AbsGS: Recovering Fine Details for 3D Gaussian Splatting

3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) technique couples 3D Gaussian primitives with differentiable rasterization to achieve high-quality novel view synthesis results while providing advanced real-time rendering performance. However, due to the flaw of its adaptive density control strategy in 3D-GS, it frequently suffers from over-reconstruction issue in intricate scenes containing high-frequency details, leading to blurry rendered images. The underlying reason for the flaw has still been under-explored. In this work, we present a comprehensive analysis of the cause of aforementioned artifacts, namely gradient collision, which prevents large Gaussians in over-reconstructed regions from splitting. To address this issue, we propose the novel homodirectional view-space positional gradient as the criterion for densification. Our strategy efficiently identifies large Gaussians in over-reconstructed regions, and recovers fine details by splitting. We evaluate our proposed method on various challenging datasets. The experimental results indicate that our approach achieves the best rendering quality with reduced or similar memory consumption. Our method is easy to implement and can be incorporated into a wide variety of most recent Gaussian Splatting-based methods. We will open source our codes upon formal publication. Our project page is available at: https://ty424.github.io/AbsGS.github.io/

TFDMNet: A Novel Network Structure Combines the Time Domain and Frequency Domain Features

Convolutional neural network (CNN) has achieved impressive success in computer vision during the past few decades. The image convolution operation helps CNNs to get good performance on image-related tasks. However, it also has high computation complexity and hard to be parallelized. This paper proposes a novel Element-wise Multiplication Layer (EML) to replace convolution layers, which can be trained in the frequency domain. Theoretical analyses show that EMLs lower the computation complexity and easier to be parallelized. Moreover, we introduce a Weight Fixation mechanism to alleviate the problem of over-fitting, and analyze the working behavior of Batch Normalization and Dropout in the frequency domain. To get the balance between the computation complexity and memory usage, we propose a new network structure, namely Time-Frequency Domain Mixture Network (TFDMNet), which combines the advantages of both convolution layers and EMLs. Experimental results imply that TFDMNet achieves good performance on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and ImageNet databases with less number of operations comparing with corresponding CNNs.

Rethinking SIGN Training: Provable Nonconvex Acceleration without First- and Second-Order Gradient Lipschitz

Sign-based stochastic methods have gained attention due to their ability to achieve robust performance despite using only the sign information for parameter updates. However, the current convergence analysis of sign-based methods relies on the strong assumptions of first-order gradient Lipschitz and second-order gradient Lipschitz, which may not hold in practical tasks like deep neural network training that involve high non-smoothness. In this paper, we revisit sign-based methods and analyze their convergence under more realistic assumptions of first- and second-order smoothness. We first establish the convergence of the sign-based method under weak first-order Lipschitz. Motivated by the weak first-order Lipschitz, we propose a relaxed second-order condition that still allows for nonconvex acceleration in sign-based methods. Based on our theoretical results, we gain insights into the computational advantages of the recently developed LION algorithm. In distributed settings, we prove that this nonconvex acceleration persists with linear speedup in the number of nodes, when utilizing fast communication compression gossip protocols. The novelty of our theoretical results lies in that they are derived under much weaker assumptions, thereby expanding the provable applicability of sign-based algorithms to a wider range of problems.

PVP: Pre-trained Visual Parameter-Efficient Tuning

Large-scale pre-trained transformers have demonstrated remarkable success in various computer vision tasks. However, it is still highly challenging to fully fine-tune these models for downstream tasks due to their high computational and storage costs. Recently, Parameter-Efficient Tuning (PETuning) techniques, e.g., Visual Prompt Tuning (VPT) and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), have significantly reduced the computation and storage cost by inserting lightweight prompt modules into the pre-trained models and tuning these prompt modules with a small number of trainable parameters, while keeping the transformer backbone frozen. Although only a few parameters need to be adjusted, most PETuning methods still require a significant amount of downstream task training data to achieve good results. The performance is inadequate on low-data regimes, especially when there are only one or two examples per class. To this end, we first empirically identify the poor performance is mainly due to the inappropriate way of initializing prompt modules, which has also been verified in the pre-trained language models. Next, we propose a Pre-trained Visual Parameter-efficient (PVP) Tuning framework, which pre-trains the parameter-efficient tuning modules first and then leverages the pre-trained modules along with the pre-trained transformer backbone to perform parameter-efficient tuning on downstream tasks. Experiment results on five Fine-Grained Visual Classification (FGVC) and VTAB-1k datasets demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art PETuning methods.

Towards Vision Transformer Unrolling Fixed-Point Algorithm: a Case Study on Image Restoration

The great success of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has inspired the algorithmic development of DNN-based Fixed-Point (DNN-FP) for computer vision tasks. DNN-FP methods, trained by Back-Propagation Through Time or computing the inaccurate inversion of the Jacobian, suffer from inferior representation ability. Motivated by the representation power of the Transformer, we propose a framework to unroll the FP and approximate each unrolled process via Transformer blocks, called FPformer. To reduce the high consumption of memory and computation, we come up with FPRformer by sharing parameters between the successive blocks. We further design a module to adapt Anderson acceleration to FPRformer to enlarge the unrolled iterations and improve the performance, called FPAformer. In order to fully exploit the capability of the Transformer, we apply the proposed model to image restoration, using self-supervised pre-training and supervised fine-tuning. 161 tasks from 4 categories of image restoration problems are used in the pre-training phase. Hereafter, the pre-trained FPformer, FPRformer, and FPAformer are further fine-tuned for the comparison scenarios. Using self-supervised pre-training and supervised fine-tuning, the proposed FPformer, FPRformer, and FPAformer achieve competitive performance with state-of-the-art image restoration methods and better training efficiency. FPAformer employs only 29.82% parameters used in SwinIR models, and provides superior performance after fine-tuning. To train these comparison models, it takes only 26.9% time used for training SwinIR models. It provides a promising way to introduce the Transformer in low-level vision tasks.

Multi-Outputs Is All You Need For Deblur

Image deblurring task is an ill-posed one, where exists infinite feasible solutions for blurry image. Modern deep learning approaches usually discard the learning of blur kernels and directly employ end-to-end supervised learning. Popular deblurring datasets define the label as one of the feasible solutions. However, we argue that it's not reasonable to specify a label directly, especially when the label is sampled from a random distribution. Therefore, we propose to make the network learn the distribution of feasible solutions, and design based on this consideration a novel multi-head output architecture and corresponding loss function for distribution learning. Our approach enables the model to output multiple feasible solutions to approximate the target distribution. We further propose a novel parameter multiplexing method that reduces the number of parameters and computational effort while improving performance. We evaluated our approach on multiple image-deblur models, including the current state-of-the-art NAFNet. The improvement of best overall (pick the highest score among multiple heads for each validation image) PSNR outperforms the compared baselines up to 0.11~0.18dB. The improvement of the best single head (pick the best-performed head among multiple heads on validation set) PSNR outperforms the compared baselines up to 0.04~0.08dB. The codes are available at https://github.com/Liu-SD/multi-output-deblur.

Visual Tree Convolutional Neural Network in Image Classification

In image classification, Convolutional Neural Network(CNN) models have achieved high performance with the rapid development in deep learning. However, some categories in the image datasets are more difficult to distinguished than others. Improving the classification accuracy on these confused categories is benefit to the overall performance. In this paper, we build a Confusion Visual Tree(CVT) based on the confused semantic level information to identify the confused categories. With the information provided by the CVT, we can lead the CNN training procedure to pay more attention on these confused categories. Therefore, we propose Visual Tree Convolutional Neural Networks(VT-CNN) based on the original deep CNN embedded with our CVT. We evaluate our VT-CNN model on the benchmark datasets CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100. In our experiments, we build up 3 different VT-CNN models and they obtain improvement over their based CNN models by 1.36%, 0.89% and 0.64%, respectively.

IF-TTN: Information Fused Temporal Transformation Network for Video Action Recognition

Effective spatiotemporal feature representation is crucial to the video-based action recognition task. Focusing on discriminate spatiotemporal feature learning, we propose Information Fused Temporal Transformation Network (IF-TTN) for action recognition on top of popular Temporal Segment Network (TSN) framework. In the network, Information Fusion Module (IFM) is designed to fuse the appearance and motion features at multiple ConvNet levels for each video snippet, forming a short-term video descriptor. With fused features as inputs, Temporal Transformation Networks (TTN) are employed to model middle-term temporal transformation between the neighboring snippets following a sequential order. As TSN itself depicts long-term temporal structure by segmental consensus, the proposed network comprehensively considers multiple granularity temporal features. Our IF-TTN achieves the state-of-the-art results on two most popular action recognition datasets: UCF101 and HMDB51. Empirical investigation reveals that our architecture is robust to the input motion map quality. Replacing optical flow with the motion vectors from compressed video stream, the performance is still comparable to the flow-based methods while the testing speed is 10x faster.

Exploring Frame Segmentation Networks for Temporal Action Localization

Temporal action localization is an important task of computer vision. Though many methods have been proposed, it still remains an open question how to predict the temporal location of action segments precisely. Most state-of-the-art works train action classifiers on video segments pre-determined by action proposal. However, recent work found that a desirable model should move beyond segment-level and make dense predictions at a fine granularity in time to determine precise temporal boundaries. In this paper, we propose a Frame Segmentation Network (FSN) that places a temporal CNN on top of the 2D spatial CNNs. Spatial CNNs are responsible for abstracting semantics in spatial dimension while temporal CNN is responsible for introducing temporal context information and performing dense predictions. The proposed FSN can make dense predictions at frame-level for a video clip using both spatial and temporal context information. FSN is trained in an end-to-end manner, so the model can be optimized in spatial and temporal domain jointly. We also adapt FSN to use it in weakly supervised scenario (WFSN), where only video level labels are provided when training. Experiment results on public dataset show that FSN achieves superior performance in both frame-level action localization and temporal action localization.

Learning Generic Diffusion Processes for Image Restoration

Image restoration problems are typical ill-posed problems where the regularization term plays an important role. The regularization term learned via generative approaches is easy to transfer to various image restoration, but offers inferior restoration quality compared with that learned via discriminative approaches. On the contrary, the regularization term learned via discriminative approaches are usually trained for a specific image restoration problem, and fail in the problem for which it is not trained. To address this issue, we propose a generic diffusion process (genericDP) to handle multiple Gaussian denoising problems based on the Trainable Non-linear Reaction Diffusion (TNRD) models. Instead of one model, which consists of a diffusion and a reaction term, for one Gaussian denoising problem in TNRD, we enforce multiple TNRD models to share one diffusion term. The trained genericDP model can provide both promising denoising performance and high training efficiency compared with the original TNRD models. We also transfer the trained diffusion term to non-blind deconvolution which is unseen in the training phase. Experiment results show that the trained diffusion term for multiple Gaussian denoising can be transferred to image non-blind deconvolution as an image prior and provide competitive performance.