UFineBench: Towards Text-based Person Retrieval with Ultra-fine Granularity

Existing text-based person retrieval datasets often have relatively coarse-grained text annotations. This hinders the model to comprehend the fine-grained semantics of query texts in real scenarios. To address this problem, we contribute a new benchmark named \textbf{UFineBench} for text-based person retrieval with ultra-fine granularity. Firstly, we construct a new \textbf{dataset} named UFine6926. We collect a large number of person images and manually annotate each image with two detailed textual descriptions, averaging 80.8 words each. The average word count is three to four times that of the previous datasets. In addition of standard in-domain evaluation, we also propose a special \textbf{evaluation paradigm} more representative of real scenarios. It contains a new evaluation set with cross domains, cross textual granularity and cross textual styles, named UFine3C, and a new evaluation metric for accurately measuring retrieval ability, named mean Similarity Distribution (mSD). Moreover, we propose CFAM, a more efficient \textbf{algorithm} especially designed for text-based person retrieval with ultra fine-grained texts. It achieves fine granularity mining by adopting a shared cross-modal granularity decoder and hard negative match mechanism. With standard in-domain evaluation, CFAM establishes competitive performance across various datasets, especially on our ultra fine-grained UFine6926. Furthermore, by evaluating on UFine3C, we demonstrate that training on our UFine6926 significantly improves generalization to real scenarios compared with other coarse-grained datasets. The dataset and code will be made publicly available at \url{https://github.com/Zplusdragon/UFineBench}.

Hierarchical Spatio-temporal Decoupling for Text-to-Video Generation

Despite diffusion models having shown powerful abilities to generate photorealistic images, generating videos that are realistic and diverse still remains in its infancy. One of the key reasons is that current methods intertwine spatial content and temporal dynamics together, leading to a notably increased complexity of text-to-video generation (T2V). In this work, we propose HiGen, a diffusion model-based method that improves performance by decoupling the spatial and temporal factors of videos from two perspectives, i.e., structure level and content level. At the structure level, we decompose the T2V task into two steps, including spatial reasoning and temporal reasoning, using a unified denoiser. Specifically, we generate spatially coherent priors using text during spatial reasoning and then generate temporally coherent motions from these priors during temporal reasoning. At the content level, we extract two subtle cues from the content of the input video that can express motion and appearance changes, respectively. These two cues then guide the model's training for generating videos, enabling flexible content variations and enhancing temporal stability. Through the decoupled paradigm, HiGen can effectively reduce the complexity of this task and generate realistic videos with semantics accuracy and motion stability. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of HiGen over the state-of-the-art T2V methods.

Lookup Table meets Local Laplacian Filter: Pyramid Reconstruction Network for Tone Mapping

Tone mapping aims to convert high dynamic range (HDR) images to low dynamic range (LDR) representations, a critical task in the camera imaging pipeline. In recent years, 3-Dimensional LookUp Table (3D LUT) based methods have gained attention due to their ability to strike a favorable balance between enhancement performance and computational efficiency. However, these methods often fail to deliver satisfactory results in local areas since the look-up table is a global operator for tone mapping, which works based on pixel values and fails to incorporate crucial local information. To this end, this paper aims to address this issue by exploring a novel strategy that integrates global and local operators by utilizing closed-form Laplacian pyramid decomposition and reconstruction. Specifically, we employ image-adaptive 3D LUTs to manipulate the tone in the low-frequency image by leveraging the specific characteristics of the frequency information. Furthermore, we utilize local Laplacian filters to refine the edge details in the high-frequency components in an adaptive manner. Local Laplacian filters are widely used to preserve edge details in photographs, but their conventional usage involves manual tuning and fixed implementation within camera imaging pipelines or photo editing tools. We propose to learn parameter value maps progressively for local Laplacian filters from annotated data using a lightweight network. Our model achieves simultaneous global tone manipulation and local edge detail preservation in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods.

Few-shot Action Recognition with Captioning Foundation Models

Transferring vision-language knowledge from pretrained multimodal foundation models to various downstream tasks is a promising direction. However, most current few-shot action recognition methods are still limited to a single visual modality input due to the high cost of annotating additional textual descriptions. In this paper, we develop an effective plug-and-play framework called CapFSAR to exploit the knowledge of multimodal models without manually annotating text. To be specific, we first utilize a captioning foundation model (i.e., BLIP) to extract visual features and automatically generate associated captions for input videos. Then, we apply a text encoder to the synthetic captions to obtain representative text embeddings. Finally, a visual-text aggregation module based on Transformer is further designed to incorporate cross-modal spatio-temporal complementary information for reliable few-shot matching. In this way, CapFSAR can benefit from powerful multimodal knowledge of pretrained foundation models, yielding more comprehensive classification in the low-shot regime. Extensive experiments on multiple standard few-shot benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed CapFSAR performs favorably against existing methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance. The code will be made publicly available.

Disentangling Spatial and Temporal Learning for Efficient Image-to-Video Transfer Learning

Recently, large-scale pre-trained language-image models like CLIP have shown extraordinary capabilities for understanding spatial contents, but naively transferring such models to video recognition still suffers from unsatisfactory temporal modeling capabilities. Existing methods insert tunable structures into or in parallel with the pre-trained model, which either requires back-propagation through the whole pre-trained model and is thus resource-demanding, or is limited by the temporal reasoning capability of the pre-trained structure. In this work, we present DiST, which disentangles the learning of spatial and temporal aspects of videos. Specifically, DiST uses a dual-encoder structure, where a pre-trained foundation model acts as the spatial encoder, and a lightweight network is introduced as the temporal encoder. An integration branch is inserted between the encoders to fuse spatio-temporal information. The disentangled spatial and temporal learning in DiST is highly efficient because it avoids the back-propagation of massive pre-trained parameters. Meanwhile, we empirically show that disentangled learning with an extra network for integration benefits both spatial and temporal understanding. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks show that DiST delivers better performance than existing state-of-the-art methods by convincing gaps. When pre-training on the large-scale Kinetics-710, we achieve 89.7% on Kinetics-400 with a frozen ViT-L model, which verifies the scalability of DiST. Codes and models can be found in https://github.com/alibaba-mmai-research/DiST.

HR-Pro: Point-supervised Temporal Action Localization via Hierarchical Reliability Propagation

Point-supervised Temporal Action Localization (PSTAL) is an emerging research direction for label-efficient learning. However, current methods mainly focus on optimizing the network either at the snippet-level or the instance-level, neglecting the inherent reliability of point annotations at both levels. In this paper, we propose a Hierarchical Reliability Propagation (HR-Pro) framework, which consists of two reliability-aware stages: Snippet-level Discrimination Learning and Instance-level Completeness Learning, both stages explore the efficient propagation of high-confidence cues in point annotations. For snippet-level learning, we introduce an online-updated memory to store reliable snippet prototypes for each class. We then employ a Reliability-aware Attention Block to capture both intra-video and inter-video dependencies of snippets, resulting in more discriminative and robust snippet representation. For instance-level learning, we propose a point-based proposal generation approach as a means of connecting snippets and instances, which produces high-confidence proposals for further optimization at the instance level. Through multi-level reliability-aware learning, we obtain more reliable confidence scores and more accurate temporal boundaries of predicted proposals. Our HR-Pro achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple challenging benchmarks, including an impressive average mAP of 60.3% on THUMOS14. Notably, our HR-Pro largely surpasses all previous point-supervised methods, and even outperforms several competitive fully supervised methods. Code will be available at https://github.com/pipixin321/HR-Pro.

Towards General Low-Light Raw Noise Synthesis and Modeling

Modeling and synthesizing low-light raw noise is a fundamental problem for computational photography and image processing applications. Although most recent works have adopted physics-based models to synthesize noise, the signal-independent noise in low-light conditions is far more complicated and varies dramatically across camera sensors, which is beyond the description of these models. To address this issue, we introduce a new perspective to synthesize the signal-independent noise by a generative model. Specifically, we synthesize the signal-dependent and signal-independent noise in a physics- and learning-based manner, respectively. In this way, our method can be considered as a general model, that is, it can simultaneously learn different noise characteristics for different ISO levels and generalize to various sensors. Subsequently, we present an effective multi-scale discriminator termed Fourier transformer discriminator (FTD) to distinguish the noise distribution accurately. Additionally, we collect a new low-light raw denoising (LRD) dataset for training and benchmarking. Qualitative validation shows that the noise generated by our proposed noise model can be highly similar to the real noise in terms of distribution. Furthermore, extensive denoising experiments demonstrate that our method performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods on different sensors.

PLIP: Language-Image Pre-training for Person Representation Learning

Pre-training has emerged as an effective technique for learning powerful person representations. Most existing methods have shown that pre-training on pure-vision large-scale datasets like ImageNet and LUPerson has achieved remarkable performance. However, solely relying on visual information, the absence of robust explicit indicators poses a challenge for these methods to learn discriminative person representations. Drawing inspiration from the intrinsic fine-grained attribute indicators of person descriptions, we explore introducing the language modality into person representation learning. To this end, we propose a novel language-image pre-training framework for person representation learning, termed PLIP. To explicitly build fine-grained cross-modal associations, we specifically design three pretext tasks, \ie semantic-fused image colorization, visual-fused attributes prediction, and vision-language matching. In addition, due to the lack of an appropriate dataset, we present a large-scale person dataset named SYNTH-PEDES, where the Stylish Pedestrian Attributes-union Captioning method is proposed to synthesize diverse textual descriptions. We pre-train PLIP on SYNTH-PEDES and evaluate our model by spanning downstream tasks such as text-based Re-ID, image-based Re-ID, and person attribute recognition. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model not only significantly improves existing methods on all these tasks, but also shows great ability in the few-shot and domain generalization settings. The code, dataset and weights will be released at~\url{https://github.com/Zplusdragon/PLIP}

MoLo: Motion-augmented Long-short Contrastive Learning for Few-shot Action Recognition

Current state-of-the-art approaches for few-shot action recognition achieve promising performance by conducting frame-level matching on learned visual features. However, they generally suffer from two limitations: i) the matching procedure between local frames tends to be inaccurate due to the lack of guidance to force long-range temporal perception; ii) explicit motion learning is usually ignored, leading to partial information loss. To address these issues, we develop a Motion-augmented Long-short Contrastive Learning (MoLo) method that contains two crucial components, including a long-short contrastive objective and a motion autodecoder. Specifically, the long-short contrastive objective is to endow local frame features with long-form temporal awareness by maximizing their agreement with the global token of videos belonging to the same class. The motion autodecoder is a lightweight architecture to reconstruct pixel motions from the differential features, which explicitly embeds the network with motion dynamics. By this means, MoLo can simultaneously learn long-range temporal context and motion cues for comprehensive few-shot matching. To demonstrate the effectiveness, we evaluate MoLo on five standard benchmarks, and the results show that MoLo favorably outperforms recent advanced methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/alibaba-mmai-research/MoLo.

CLIP-guided Prototype Modulating for Few-shot Action Recognition

Learning from large-scale contrastive language-image pre-training like CLIP has shown remarkable success in a wide range of downstream tasks recently, but it is still under-explored on the challenging few-shot action recognition (FSAR) task. In this work, we aim to transfer the powerful multimodal knowledge of CLIP to alleviate the inaccurate prototype estimation issue due to data scarcity, which is a critical problem in low-shot regimes. To this end, we present a CLIP-guided prototype modulating framework called CLIP-FSAR, which consists of two key components: a video-text contrastive objective and a prototype modulation. Specifically, the former bridges the task discrepancy between CLIP and the few-shot video task by contrasting videos and corresponding class text descriptions. The latter leverages the transferable textual concepts from CLIP to adaptively refine visual prototypes with a temporal Transformer. By this means, CLIP-FSAR can take full advantage of the rich semantic priors in CLIP to obtain reliable prototypes and achieve accurate few-shot classification. Extensive experiments on five commonly used benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, and CLIP-FSAR significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods under various settings. The source code and models will be publicly available at https://github.com/alibaba-mmai-research/CLIP-FSAR.