Continuous-Multiple Image Outpainting in One-Step via Positional Query and A Diffusion-based Approach

Image outpainting aims to generate the content of an input sub-image beyond its original boundaries. It is an important task in content generation yet remains an open problem for generative models. This paper pushes the technical frontier of image outpainting in two directions that have not been resolved in literature: 1) outpainting with arbitrary and continuous multiples (without restriction), and 2) outpainting in a single step (even for large expansion multiples). Moreover, we develop a method that does not depend on a pre-trained backbone network, which is in contrast commonly required by the previous SOTA outpainting methods. The arbitrary multiple outpainting is achieved by utilizing randomly cropped views from the same image during training to capture arbitrary relative positional information. Specifically, by feeding one view and positional embeddings as queries, we can reconstruct another view. At inference, we generate images with arbitrary expansion multiples by inputting an anchor image and its corresponding positional embeddings. The one-step outpainting ability here is particularly noteworthy in contrast to previous methods that need to be performed for $N$ times to obtain a final multiple which is $N$ times of its basic and fixed multiple. We evaluate the proposed approach (called PQDiff as we adopt a diffusion-based generator as our embodiment, under our proposed \textbf{P}ositional \textbf{Q}uery scheme) on public benchmarks, demonstrating its superior performance over state-of-the-art approaches. Specifically, PQDiff achieves state-of-the-art FID scores on the Scenery (\textbf{21.512}), Building Facades (\textbf{25.310}), and WikiArts (\textbf{36.212}) datasets. Furthermore, under the 2.25x, 5x and 11.7x outpainting settings, PQDiff only takes \textbf{40.6\%}, \textbf{20.3\%} and \textbf{10.2\%} of the time of the benchmark state-of-the-art (SOTA) method.

DMT: Comprehensive Distillation with Multiple Self-supervised Teachers

Numerous self-supervised learning paradigms, such as contrastive learning and masked image modeling, have been proposed to acquire powerful and general representations from unlabeled data. However, these models are commonly pretrained within their specific framework alone, failing to consider the complementary nature of visual representations. To tackle this issue, we introduce Comprehensive Distillation with Multiple Self-supervised Teachers (DMT) for pretrained model compression, which leverages the strengths of multiple off-the-shelf self-supervised models. Our experimental results on prominent benchmark datasets exhibit that the proposed method significantly surpasses state-of-the-art competitors while retaining favorable efficiency metrics. On classification tasks, our DMT framework utilizing three different self-supervised ViT-Base teachers enhances the performance of both small/tiny models and the base model itself. For dense tasks, DMT elevates the AP/mIoU of standard SSL models on MS-COCO and ADE20K datasets by 4.0%.

Language-guided Few-shot Semantic Segmentation

Few-shot learning is a promising way for reducing the label cost in new categories adaptation with the guidance of a small, well labeled support set. But for few-shot semantic segmentation, the pixel-level annotations of support images are still expensive. In this paper, we propose an innovative solution to tackle the challenge of few-shot semantic segmentation using only language information, i.e.image-level text labels. Our approach involves a vision-language-driven mask distillation scheme, which contains a vision-language pretraining (VLP) model and a mask refiner, to generate high quality pseudo-semantic masks from text prompts. We additionally introduce a distributed prototype supervision method and complementary correlation matching module to guide the model in digging precise semantic relations among support and query images. The experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method establishes a new baseline for language-guided few-shot semantic segmentation and achieves competitive results to recent vision-guided methods.

InfMLLM: A Unified Framework for Visual-Language Tasks

Large language models (LLMs) have proven their remarkable versatility in handling a comprehensive range of language-centric applications. To expand LLMs' capabilities to a broader spectrum of modal inputs, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have attracted growing interest. This work delves into enabling LLMs to tackle more vision-language-related tasks, particularly image captioning, visual question answering (VQA,) and visual grounding. To this end, we implemented a three-stage training scheme: starting with lightweight alignment pretraining, then moderate-weight multitask hybrid training, and finally, LLM fine-tuning to improve instruction following capability. Throughout the training process, the requirements on GPU memory gradually increase. To effectively manage the number of visual embeddings passed to the LLM while preserving their positional information, we introduce a straightforward visual adapter module dubbed pool-adapter. Our experiments demonstrate that preserving the positional information of visual embeddings through the pool-adapter is particularly beneficial for tasks like visual grounding. We name our proposed approach InfMLLM and have evaluated it extensively on various benchmark datasets. Our results demonstrate that InfMLLM achieves either state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance or performance comparable to recent MLLMs. The code and model will be made open-source at: \url{https://github.com/mightyzau/InfMLLM}.

PAD: A Dataset and Benchmark for Pose-agnostic Anomaly Detection

Object anomaly detection is an important problem in the field of machine vision and has seen remarkable progress recently. However, two significant challenges hinder its research and application. First, existing datasets lack comprehensive visual information from various pose angles. They usually have an unrealistic assumption that the anomaly-free training dataset is pose-aligned, and the testing samples have the same pose as the training data. However, in practice, anomaly may exist in any regions on a object, the training and query samples may have different poses, calling for the study on pose-agnostic anomaly detection. Second, the absence of a consensus on experimental protocols for pose-agnostic anomaly detection leads to unfair comparisons of different methods, hindering the research on pose-agnostic anomaly detection. To address these issues, we develop Multi-pose Anomaly Detection (MAD) dataset and Pose-agnostic Anomaly Detection (PAD) benchmark, which takes the first step to address the pose-agnostic anomaly detection problem. Specifically, we build MAD using 20 complex-shaped LEGO toys including 4K views with various poses, and high-quality and diverse 3D anomalies in both simulated and real environments. Additionally, we propose a novel method OmniposeAD, trained using MAD, specifically designed for pose-agnostic anomaly detection. Through comprehensive evaluations, we demonstrate the relevance of our dataset and method. Furthermore, we provide an open-source benchmark library, including dataset and baseline methods that cover 8 anomaly detection paradigms, to facilitate future research and application in this domain. Code, data, and models are publicly available at https://github.com/EricLee0224/PAD.

A ModelOps-based Framework for Intelligent Medical Knowledge Extraction

Extracting medical knowledge from healthcare texts enhances downstream tasks like medical knowledge graph construction and clinical decision-making. However, the construction and application of knowledge extraction models lack automation, reusability and unified management, leading to inefficiencies for researchers and high barriers for non-AI experts such as doctors, to utilize knowledge extraction. To address these issues, we propose a ModelOps-based intelligent medical knowledge extraction framework that offers a low-code system for model selection, training, evaluation and optimization. Specifically, the framework includes a dataset abstraction mechanism based on multi-layer callback functions, a reusable model training, monitoring and management mechanism. We also propose a model recommendation method based on dataset similarity, which helps users quickly find potentially suitable models for a given dataset. Our framework provides convenience for researchers to develop models and simplifies model access for non-AI experts such as doctors.

ICPC: Instance-Conditioned Prompting with Contrastive Learning for Semantic Segmentation

Modern supervised semantic segmentation methods are usually finetuned based on the supervised or self-supervised models pre-trained on ImageNet. Recent work shows that transferring the knowledge from CLIP to semantic segmentation via prompt learning can achieve promising performance. The performance boost comes from the feature enhancement with multimodal alignment, i.e., the dot product between vision and text embeddings. However, how to improve the multimodal alignment for better transfer performance in dense tasks remains underexplored. In this work, we focus on improving the quality of vision-text alignment from two aspects of prompting design and loss function, and present an instance-conditioned prompting with contrastive learning (ICPC) framework. First, compared with the static prompt designs, we reveal that dynamic prompting conditioned on image content can more efficiently utilize the text encoder for complex dense tasks. Second, we propose an align-guided contrastive loss to refine the alignment of vision and text embeddings. We further propose lightweight multi-scale alignment for better performance. Extensive experiments on three large-scale datasets (ADE20K, COCO-Stuff10k, and ADE20K-Full) demonstrate that ICPC brings consistent improvements across diverse backbones. Taking ResNet-50 as an example, ICPC outperforms the state-of-the-art counterpart by 1.71%, 1.05%, and 1.41% mIoU on the three datasets, respectively.

ES-MVSNet: Efficient Framework for End-to-end Self-supervised Multi-View Stereo

Compared to the multi-stage self-supervised multi-view stereo (MVS) method, the end-to-end (E2E) approach has received more attention due to its concise and efficient training pipeline. Recent E2E self-supervised MVS approaches have integrated third-party models (such as optical flow models, semantic segmentation models, NeRF models, etc.) to provide additional consistency constraints, which grows GPU memory consumption and complicates the model's structure and training pipeline. In this work, we propose an efficient framework for end-to-end self-supervised MVS, dubbed ES-MVSNet. To alleviate the high memory consumption of current E2E self-supervised MVS frameworks, we present a memory-efficient architecture that reduces memory usage by 43% without compromising model performance. Furthermore, with the novel design of asymmetric view selection policy and region-aware depth consistency, we achieve state-of-the-art performance among E2E self-supervised MVS methods, without relying on third-party models for additional consistency signals. Extensive experiments on DTU and Tanks&Temples benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed ES-MVSNet approach achieves state-of-the-art performance among E2E self-supervised MVS methods and competitive performance to many supervised and multi-stage self-supervised methods.

RegionBLIP: A Unified Multi-modal Pre-training Framework for Holistic and Regional Comprehension

In this work, we investigate extending the comprehension of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to regional objects. To this end, we propose to extract features corresponding to regional objects as soft prompts for LLM, which provides a straightforward and scalable approach and eliminates the need for LLM fine-tuning. To effectively extract regional features from regular image features and irregular point cloud features, we present a novel and unified position-assisted feature extraction module. Furthermore, training an MLLM from scratch is highly time-consuming. Thus, we propose incrementally extending existing pre-trained MLLMs to comprehend more modalities and the regional objects of those modalities. Specifically, we freeze the Q-Former from BLIP-2, an impressive MLLM, and optimize the modality-specific Lora parameters in Q-Former and LLM for each newly introduced modality. The freezing of the Q-Former eliminates the need for extensive pre-training on massive image-text data. The freezed Q-Former pre-trained from massive image-text data is also beneficial for the pre-training on image-region-text data. We name our framework RegionBLIP. We pre-train RegionBLIP on image-region-text, point-cloud-text, and point-cloud-region-text data. Experimental results verify that \Ours{} can preserve the image comprehension capability of BILP-2 and further gain a comprehension of the newly introduced point cloud modality and regional objects. The Data, Code, and Pre-trained models will be available at https://github.com/mightyzau/RegionBLIP.

Dynamic Token-Pass Transformers for Semantic Segmentation

Vision transformers (ViT) usually extract features via forwarding all the tokens in the self-attention layers from top to toe. In this paper, we introduce dynamic token-pass vision transformers (DoViT) for semantic segmentation, which can adaptively reduce the inference cost for images with different complexity. DoViT gradually stops partial easy tokens from self-attention calculation and keeps the hard tokens forwarding until meeting the stopping criteria. We employ lightweight auxiliary heads to make the token-pass decision and divide the tokens into keeping/stopping parts. With a token separate calculation, the self-attention layers are speeded up with sparse tokens and still work friendly with hardware. A token reconstruction module is built to collect and reset the grouped tokens to their original position in the sequence, which is necessary to predict correct semantic masks. We conduct extensive experiments on two common semantic segmentation tasks, and demonstrate that our method greatly reduces about 40% $\sim$ 60% FLOPs and the drop of mIoU is within 0.8% for various segmentation transformers. The throughput and inference speed of ViT-L/B are increased to more than 2$\times$ on Cityscapes.