Think Twice Before Recognizing: Large Multimodal Models for General Fine-grained Traffic Sign Recognition

We propose a new strategy called think twice before recognizing to improve fine-grained traffic sign recognition (TSR). Fine-grained TSR in the wild is difficult due to the complex road conditions, and existing approaches particularly struggle with cross-country TSR when data is lacking. Our strategy achieves effective fine-grained TSR by stimulating the multiple-thinking capability of large multimodal models (LMM). We introduce context, characteristic, and differential descriptions to design multiple thinking processes for the LMM. The context descriptions with center coordinate prompt optimization help the LMM to locate the target traffic sign in the original road images containing multiple traffic signs and filter irrelevant answers through the proposed prior traffic sign hypothesis. The characteristic description is based on few-shot in-context learning of template traffic signs, which decreases the cross-domain difference and enhances the fine-grained recognition capability of the LMM. The differential descriptions of similar traffic signs optimize the multimodal thinking capability of the LMM. The proposed method is independent of training data and requires only simple and uniform instructions. We conducted extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets and two real-world datasets from different countries, and the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art TSR results on all five datasets.

MMT-BERT: Chord-aware Symbolic Music Generation Based on Multitrack Music Transformer and MusicBERT

We propose a novel symbolic music representation and Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) framework specially designed for symbolic multitrack music generation. The main theme of symbolic music generation primarily encompasses the preprocessing of music data and the implementation of a deep learning framework. Current techniques dedicated to symbolic music generation generally encounter two significant challenges: training data's lack of information about chords and scales and the requirement of specially designed model architecture adapted to the unique format of symbolic music representation. In this paper, we solve the above problems by introducing new symbolic music representation with MusicLang chord analysis model. We propose our MMT-BERT architecture adapting to the representation. To build a robust multitrack music generator, we fine-tune a pre-trained MusicBERT model to serve as the discriminator, and incorporate relativistic standard loss. This approach, supported by the in-depth understanding of symbolic music encoded within MusicBERT, fortifies the consonance and humanity of music generated by our method. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach which strictly follows the state-of-the-art methods.

Generative Dataset Distillation Based on Diffusion Model

This paper presents our method for the generative track of The First Dataset Distillation Challenge at ECCV 2024. Since the diffusion model has become the mainstay of generative models because of its high-quality generative effects, we focus on distillation methods based on the diffusion model. Considering that the track can only generate a fixed number of images in 10 minutes using a generative model for CIFAR-100 and Tiny-ImageNet datasets, we need to use a generative model that can generate images at high speed. In this study, we proposed a novel generative dataset distillation method based on Stable Diffusion. Specifically, we use the SDXL-Turbo model which can generate images at high speed and quality. Compared to other diffusion models that can only generate images per class (IPC) = 1, our method can achieve an IPC = 10 for Tiny-ImageNet and an IPC = 20 for CIFAR-100, respectively. Additionally, to generate high-quality distilled datasets for CIFAR-100 and Tiny-ImageNet, we use the class information as text prompts and post data augmentation for the SDXL-Turbo model. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method, and we achieved third place in the generative track of the ECCV 2024 DD Challenge. Codes are available at https://github.com/Guang000/BANKO.

Cross-domain Few-shot In-context Learning for Enhancing Traffic Sign Recognition

Recent multimodal large language models (MLLM) such as GPT-4o and GPT-4v have shown great potential in autonomous driving. In this paper, we propose a cross-domain few-shot in-context learning method based on the MLLM for enhancing traffic sign recognition (TSR). We first construct a traffic sign detection network based on Vision Transformer Adapter and an extraction module to extract traffic signs from the original road images. To reduce the dependence on training data and improve the performance stability of cross-country TSR, we introduce a cross-domain few-shot in-context learning method based on the MLLM. To enhance MLLM's fine-grained recognition ability of traffic signs, the proposed method generates corresponding description texts using template traffic signs. These description texts contain key information about the shape, color, and composition of traffic signs, which can stimulate the ability of MLLM to perceive fine-grained traffic sign categories. By using the description texts, our method reduces the cross-domain differences between template and real traffic signs. Our approach requires only simple and uniform textual indications, without the need for large-scale traffic sign images and labels. We perform comprehensive evaluations on the German traffic sign recognition benchmark dataset, the Belgium traffic sign dataset, and two real-world datasets taken from Japan. The experimental results show that our method significantly enhances the TSR performance.

Zero-shot Composed Image Retrieval Considering Query-target Relationship Leveraging Masked Image-text Pairs

This paper proposes a novel zero-shot composed image retrieval (CIR) method considering the query-target relationship by masked image-text pairs. The objective of CIR is to retrieve the target image using a query image and a query text. Existing methods use a textual inversion network to convert the query image into a pseudo word to compose the image and text and use a pre-trained visual-language model to realize the retrieval. However, they do not consider the query-target relationship to train the textual inversion network to acquire information for retrieval. In this paper, we propose a novel zero-shot CIR method that is trained end-to-end using masked image-text pairs. By exploiting the abundant image-text pairs that are convenient to obtain with a masking strategy for learning the query-target relationship, it is expected that accurate zero-shot CIR using a retrieval-focused textual inversion network can be realized. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Reinforcing Pre-trained Models Using Counterfactual Images

This paper proposes a novel framework to reinforce classification models using language-guided generated counterfactual images. Deep learning classification models are often trained using datasets that mirror real-world scenarios. In this training process, because learning is based solely on correlations with labels, there is a risk that models may learn spurious relationships, such as an overreliance on features not central to the subject, like background elements in images. However, due to the black-box nature of the decision-making process in deep learning models, identifying and addressing these vulnerabilities has been particularly challenging. We introduce a novel framework for reinforcing the classification models, which consists of a two-stage process. First, we identify model weaknesses by testing the model using the counterfactual image dataset, which is generated by perturbed image captions. Subsequently, we employ the counterfactual images as an augmented dataset to fine-tune and reinforce the classification model. Through extensive experiments on several classification models across various datasets, we revealed that fine-tuning with a small set of counterfactual images effectively strengthens the model.

Generative Dataset Distillation: Balancing Global Structure and Local Details

In this paper, we propose a new dataset distillation method that considers balancing global structure and local details when distilling the information from a large dataset into a generative model. Dataset distillation has been proposed to reduce the size of the required dataset when training models. The conventional dataset distillation methods face the problem of long redeployment time and poor cross-architecture performance. Moreover, previous methods focused too much on the high-level semantic attributes between the synthetic dataset and the original dataset while ignoring the local features such as texture and shape. Based on the above understanding, we propose a new method for distilling the original image dataset into a generative model. Our method involves using a conditional generative adversarial network to generate the distilled dataset. Subsequently, we ensure balancing global structure and local details in the distillation process, continuously optimizing the generator for more information-dense dataset generation.

Enhancing Generative Class Incremental Learning Performance with Model Forgetting Approach

This study presents a novel approach to Generative Class Incremental Learning (GCIL) by introducing the forgetting mechanism, aimed at dynamically managing class information for better adaptation to streaming data. GCIL is one of the hot topics in the field of computer vision, and this is considered one of the crucial tasks in society, specifically the continual learning of generative models. The ability to forget is a crucial brain function that facilitates continual learning by selectively discarding less relevant information for humans. However, in the field of machine learning models, the concept of intentionally forgetting has not been extensively investigated. In this study we aim to bridge this gap by incorporating the forgetting mechanisms into GCIL, thereby examining their impact on the models' ability to learn in continual learning. Through our experiments, we have found that integrating the forgetting mechanisms significantly enhances the models' performance in acquiring new knowledge, underscoring the positive role that strategic forgetting plays in the process of continual learning.

Prompt-based Personalized Federated Learning for Medical Visual Question Answering

We present a novel prompt-based personalized federated learning (pFL) method to address data heterogeneity and privacy concerns in traditional medical visual question answering (VQA) methods. Specifically, we regard medical datasets from different organs as clients and use pFL to train personalized transformer-based VQA models for each client. To address the high computational complexity of client-to-client communication in previous pFL methods, we propose a succinct information sharing system by introducing prompts that are small learnable parameters. In addition, the proposed method introduces a reliability parameter to prevent the negative effects of low performance and irrelevant clients. Finally, extensive evaluations on various heterogeneous medical datasets attest to the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Importance-Aware Adaptive Dataset Distillation

Herein, we propose a novel dataset distillation method for constructing small informative datasets that preserve the information of the large original datasets. The development of deep learning models is enabled by the availability of large-scale datasets. Despite unprecedented success, large-scale datasets considerably increase the storage and transmission costs, resulting in a cumbersome model training process. Moreover, using raw data for training raises privacy and copyright concerns. To address these issues, a new task named dataset distillation has been introduced, aiming to synthesize a compact dataset that retains the essential information from the large original dataset. State-of-the-art (SOTA) dataset distillation methods have been proposed by matching gradients or network parameters obtained during training on real and synthetic datasets. The contribution of different network parameters to the distillation process varies, and uniformly treating them leads to degraded distillation performance. Based on this observation, we propose an importance-aware adaptive dataset distillation (IADD) method that can improve distillation performance by automatically assigning importance weights to different network parameters during distillation, thereby synthesizing more robust distilled datasets. IADD demonstrates superior performance over other SOTA dataset distillation methods based on parameter matching on multiple benchmark datasets and outperforms them in terms of cross-architecture generalization. In addition, the analysis of self-adaptive weights demonstrates the effectiveness of IADD. Furthermore, the effectiveness of IADD is validated in a real-world medical application such as COVID-19 detection.