Caption Anything: Interactive Image Description with Diverse Multimodal Controls

Controllable image captioning is an emerging multimodal topic that aims to describe the image with natural language following human purpose, $\textit{e.g.}$, looking at the specified regions or telling in a particular text style. State-of-the-art methods are trained on annotated pairs of input controls and output captions. However, the scarcity of such well-annotated multimodal data largely limits their usability and scalability for interactive AI systems. Leveraging unimodal instruction-following foundation models is a promising alternative that benefits from broader sources of data. In this paper, we present Caption AnyThing (CAT), a foundation model augmented image captioning framework supporting a wide range of multimodel controls: 1) visual controls, including points, boxes, and trajectories; 2) language controls, such as sentiment, length, language, and factuality. Powered by Segment Anything Model (SAM) and ChatGPT, we unify the visual and language prompts into a modularized framework, enabling the flexible combination between different controls. Extensive case studies demonstrate the user intention alignment capabilities of our framework, shedding light on effective user interaction modeling in vision-language applications. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ttengwang/Caption-Anything.

BEVSimDet: Simulated Multi-modal Distillation in Bird's-Eye View for Multi-view 3D Object Detection

Multi-view camera-based 3D object detection has gained popularity due to its low cost. But accurately inferring 3D geometry solely from camera data remains challenging, which impacts model performance. One promising approach to address this issue is to distill precise 3D geometry knowledge from LiDAR data. However, transferring knowledge between different sensor modalities is hindered by the significant modality gap. In this paper, we approach this challenge from the perspective of both architecture design and knowledge distillation and present a new simulated multi-modal 3D object detection method named BEVSimDet. We first introduce a novel framework that includes a LiDAR and camera fusion-based teacher and a simulated multi-modal student, where the student simulates multi-modal features with image-only input. To facilitate effective distillation, we propose a simulated multi-modal distillation scheme that supports intra-modal, cross-modal, and multi-modal distillation simultaneously, in Bird's-eye-view (BEV) space. By combining them together, BEVSimDet can learn better feature representations for 3D object detection while enjoying cost-effective camera-only deployment. Experimental results on the challenging nuScenes benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of BEVSimDet over recent representative methods. The source code will be released at \href{https://github.com/ViTAE-Transformer/BEVSimDet}{BEVSimDet}.

OmniForce: On Human-Centered, Large Model Empowered and Cloud-Edge Collaborative AutoML System

Automated machine learning (AutoML) seeks to build ML models with minimal human effort. While considerable research has been conducted in the area of AutoML in general, aiming to take humans out of the loop when building artificial intelligence (AI) applications, scant literature has focused on how AutoML works well in open-environment scenarios such as the process of training and updating large models, industrial supply chains or the industrial metaverse, where people often face open-loop problems during the search process: they must continuously collect data, update data and models, satisfy the requirements of the development and deployment environment, support massive devices, modify evaluation metrics, etc. Addressing the open-environment issue with pure data-driven approaches requires considerable data, computing resources, and effort from dedicated data engineers, making current AutoML systems and platforms inefficient and computationally intractable. Human-computer interaction is a practical and feasible way to tackle the problem of open-environment AI. In this paper, we introduce OmniForce, a human-centered AutoML (HAML) system that yields both human-assisted ML and ML-assisted human techniques, to put an AutoML system into practice and build adaptive AI in open-environment scenarios. Specifically, we present OmniForce in terms of ML version management; pipeline-driven development and deployment collaborations; a flexible search strategy framework; and widely provisioned and crowdsourced application algorithms, including large models. Furthermore, the (large) models constructed by OmniForce can be automatically turned into remote services in a few minutes; this process is dubbed model as a service (MaaS). Experimental results obtained in multiple search spaces and real-world use cases demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of OmniForce.

Domain Re-Modulation for Few-Shot Generative Domain Adaptation

In this study, we investigate the task of few-shot Generative Domain Adaptation (GDA), which involves transferring a pre-trained generator from one domain to a new domain using one or a few reference images. Building upon previous research that has focused on Target-domain Consistency, Large Diversity, and Cross-domain Consistency, we conclude two additional desired properties for GDA: Memory and Domain Association. To meet these properties, we proposed a novel method Domain Re-Modulation (DoRM). Specifically, DoRM freezes the source generator and employs additional mapping and affine modules (M&A module) to capture the attributes of the target domain, resulting in a linearly combinable domain shift in style space. This allows for high-fidelity multi-domain and hybrid-domain generation by integrating multiple M&A modules in a single generator. DoRM is lightweight and easy to implement. Extensive experiments demonstrated the superior performance of DoRM on both one-shot and 10-shot GDA, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Additionally, for the first time, multi-domain and hybrid-domain generation can be achieved with a minimal storage cost by using a single model. The code will be available at https://github.com/wuyi2020/DoRM.

DeepSolo: Let Transformer Decoder with Explicit Points Solo for Text Spotting

End-to-end text spotting aims to integrate scene text detection and recognition into a unified framework. Dealing with the relationship between the two sub-tasks plays a pivotal role in designing effective spotters. Although transformer-based methods eliminate the heuristic post-processing, they still suffer from the synergy issue between the sub-tasks and low training efficiency. In this paper, we present DeepSolo, a simple detection transformer baseline that lets a single Decoder with Explicit Points Solo for text detection and recognition simultaneously. Technically, for each text instance, we represent the character sequence as ordered points and model them with learnable explicit point queries. After passing a single decoder, the point queries have encoded requisite text semantics and locations and thus can be further decoded to the center line, boundary, script, and confidence of text via very simple prediction heads in parallel, solving the sub-tasks in text spotting in a unified framework. Besides, we also introduce a text-matching criterion to deliver more accurate supervisory signals, thus enabling more efficient training. Quantitative experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that DeepSolo outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods and achieves better training efficiency. In addition, DeepSolo is also compatible with line annotations, which require much less annotation cost than polygons. The code will be released.

Adaptive Edge-to-Edge Interaction Learning for Point Cloud Analysis

Recent years have witnessed the great success of deep learning on various point cloud analysis tasks, e.g., classification and semantic segmentation. Since point cloud data is sparse and irregularly distributed, one key issue for point cloud data processing is extracting useful information from local regions. To achieve this, previous works mainly extract the points' features from local regions by learning the relation between each pair of adjacent points. However, these works ignore the relation between edges in local regions, which encodes the local shape information. Associating the neighbouring edges could potentially make the point-to-point relation more aware of the local structure and more robust. To explore the role of the relation between edges, this paper proposes a novel Adaptive Edge-to-Edge Interaction Learning module, which aims to enhance the point-to-point relation through modelling the edge-to-edge interaction in the local region adaptively. We further extend the module to a symmetric version to capture the local structure more thoroughly. Taking advantage of the proposed modules, we develop two networks for segmentation and shape classification tasks, respectively. Various experiments on several public point cloud datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for point cloud analysis.

MetaComp: Learning to Adapt for Online Depth Completion

Relying on deep supervised or self-supervised learning, previous methods for depth completion from paired single image and sparse depth data have achieved impressive performance in recent years. However, facing a new environment where the test data occurs online and differs from the training data in the RGB image content and depth sparsity, the trained model might suffer severe performance drop. To encourage the trained model to work well in such conditions, we expect it to be capable of adapting to the new environment continuously and effectively. To achieve this, we propose MetaComp. It utilizes the meta-learning technique to simulate adaptation policies during the training phase, and then adapts the model to new environments in a self-supervised manner in testing. Considering that the input is multi-modal data, it would be challenging to adapt a model to variations in two modalities simultaneously, due to significant differences in structure and form of the two modal data. Therefore, we further propose to disentangle the adaptation procedure in the basic meta-learning training into two steps, the first one focusing on the depth sparsity while the second attending to the image content. During testing, we take the same strategy to adapt the model online to new multi-modal data. Experimental results and comprehensive ablations show that our MetaComp is capable of adapting to the depth completion in a new environment effectively and robust to changes in different modalities.