State Space Model for New-Generation Network Alternative to Transformers: A Survey

In the post-deep learning era, the Transformer architecture has demonstrated its powerful performance across pre-trained big models and various downstream tasks. However, the enormous computational demands of this architecture have deterred many researchers. To further reduce the complexity of attention models, numerous efforts have been made to design more efficient methods. Among them, the State Space Model (SSM), as a possible replacement for the self-attention based Transformer model, has drawn more and more attention in recent years. In this paper, we give the first comprehensive review of these works and also provide experimental comparisons and analysis to better demonstrate the features and advantages of SSM. Specifically, we first give a detailed description of principles to help the readers quickly capture the key ideas of SSM. After that, we dive into the reviews of existing SSMs and their various applications, including natural language processing, computer vision, graph, multi-modal and multi-media, point cloud/event stream, time series data, and other domains. In addition, we give statistical comparisons and analysis of these models and hope it helps the readers to understand the effectiveness of different structures on various tasks. Then, we propose possible research points in this direction to better promote the development of the theoretical model and application of SSM. More related works will be continuously updated on the following GitHub: https://github.com/Event-AHU/Mamba_State_Space_Model_Paper_List.

Long-term Frame-Event Visual Tracking: Benchmark Dataset and Baseline

Current event-/frame-event based trackers undergo evaluation on short-term tracking datasets, however, the tracking of real-world scenarios involves long-term tracking, and the performance of existing tracking algorithms in these scenarios remains unclear. In this paper, we first propose a new long-term and large-scale frame-event single object tracking dataset, termed FELT. It contains 742 videos and 1,594,474 RGB frames and event stream pairs and has become the largest frame-event tracking dataset to date. We re-train and evaluate 15 baseline trackers on our dataset for future works to compare. More importantly, we find that the RGB frames and event streams are naturally incomplete due to the influence of challenging factors and spatially sparse event flow. In response to this, we propose a novel associative memory Transformer network as a unified backbone by introducing modern Hopfield layers into multi-head self-attention blocks to fuse both RGB and event data. Extensive experiments on both FELT and RGB-T tracking dataset LasHeR fully validated the effectiveness of our model. The dataset and source code can be found at \url{https://github.com/Event-AHU/FELT_SOT_Benchmark}.

Unleashing the Power of CNN and Transformer for Balanced RGB-Event Video Recognition

Pattern recognition based on RGB-Event data is a newly arising research topic and previous works usually learn their features using CNN or Transformer. As we know, CNN captures the local features well and the cascaded self-attention mechanisms are good at extracting the long-range global relations. It is intuitive to combine them for high-performance RGB-Event based video recognition, however, existing works fail to achieve a good balance between the accuracy and model parameters, as shown in Fig.~\ref{firstimage}. In this work, we propose a novel RGB-Event based recognition framework termed TSCFormer, which is a relatively lightweight CNN-Transformer model. Specifically, we mainly adopt the CNN as the backbone network to first encode both RGB and Event data. Meanwhile, we initialize global tokens as the input and fuse them with RGB and Event features using the BridgeFormer module. It captures the global long-range relations well between both modalities and maintains the simplicity of the whole model architecture at the same time. The enhanced features will be projected and fused into the RGB and Event CNN blocks, respectively, in an interactive manner using F2E and F2V modules. Similar operations are conducted for other CNN blocks to achieve adaptive fusion and local-global feature enhancement under different resolutions. Finally, we concatenate these three features and feed them into the classification head for pattern recognition. Extensive experiments on two large-scale RGB-Event benchmark datasets (PokerEvent and HARDVS) fully validated the effectiveness of our proposed TSCFormer. The source code and pre-trained models will be released at https://github.com/Event-AHU/TSCFormer.

Event Stream-based Visual Object Tracking: A High-Resolution Benchmark Dataset and A Novel Baseline

Tracking using bio-inspired event cameras has drawn more and more attention in recent years. Existing works either utilize aligned RGB and event data for accurate tracking or directly learn an event-based tracker. The first category needs more cost for inference and the second one may be easily influenced by noisy events or sparse spatial resolution. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical knowledge distillation framework that can fully utilize multi-modal / multi-view information during training to facilitate knowledge transfer, enabling us to achieve high-speed and low-latency visual tracking during testing by using only event signals. Specifically, a teacher Transformer-based multi-modal tracking framework is first trained by feeding the RGB frame and event stream simultaneously. Then, we design a new hierarchical knowledge distillation strategy which includes pairwise similarity, feature representation, and response maps-based knowledge distillation to guide the learning of the student Transformer network. Moreover, since existing event-based tracking datasets are all low-resolution ($346 \times 260$), we propose the first large-scale high-resolution ($1280 \times 720$) dataset named EventVOT. It contains 1141 videos and covers a wide range of categories such as pedestrians, vehicles, UAVs, ping pongs, etc. Extensive experiments on both low-resolution (FE240hz, VisEvent, COESOT), and our newly proposed high-resolution EventVOT dataset fully validated the effectiveness of our proposed method. The dataset, evaluation toolkit, and source code are available on \url{https://github.com/Event-AHU/EventVOT_Benchmark}