DestripeCycleGAN: Stripe Simulation CycleGAN for Unsupervised Infrared Image Destriping

CycleGAN has been proven to be an advanced approach for unsupervised image restoration. This framework consists of two generators: a denoising one for inference and an auxiliary one for modeling noise to fulfill cycle-consistency constraints. However, when applied to the infrared destriping task, it becomes challenging for the vanilla auxiliary generator to consistently produce vertical noise under unsupervised constraints. This poses a threat to the effectiveness of the cycle-consistency loss, leading to stripe noise residual in the denoised image. To address the above issue, we present a novel framework for single-frame infrared image destriping, named DestripeCycleGAN. In this model, the conventional auxiliary generator is replaced with a priori stripe generation model (SGM) to introduce vertical stripe noise in the clean data, and the gradient map is employed to re-establish cycle-consistency. Meanwhile, a Haar wavelet background guidance module (HBGM) has been designed to minimize the divergence of background details between the different domains. To preserve vertical edges, a multi-level wavelet U-Net (MWUNet) is proposed as the denoising generator, which utilizes the Haar wavelet transform as the sampler to decline directional information loss. Moreover, it incorporates the group fusion block (GFB) into skip connections to fuse the multi-scale features and build the context of long-distance dependencies. Extensive experiments on real and synthetic data demonstrate that our DestripeCycleGAN surpasses the state-of-the-art methods in terms of visual quality and quantitative evaluation. Our code will be made public at https://github.com/0wuji/DestripeCycleGAN.

ARCNet: An Asymmetric Residual Wavelet Column Correction Network for Infrared Image Destriping

Infrared image destriping seeks to restore high-quality content from degraded images. Recent works mainly address this task by leveraging prior knowledge to separate stripe noise from the degraded image. However, constructing a robust decoupling model for that purpose remains challenging, especially when significant similarities exist between the stripe noise and vertical background structure. Addressing that, we introduce Asymmetric Residual wavelet Column correction Network (ARCNet) for image destriping, aiming to consistently preserve spatially precise high-resolution representations. Our neural model leverages a novel downsampler, residual haar discrete wavelet transform (RHDWT), stripe directional prior knowledge and data-driven learning to induce a model with enriched feature representation of stripe noise and background. In our technique, the inverse wavelet transform is replaced by transposed convolution for feature upsampling, which can suppress noise crosstalk and encourage the network to focus on robust image reconstruction. After each sampling, a proposed column non-uniformity correction module (CNCM) is leveraged by our method to enhance column uniformity, spatial correlation, and global self-dependence between each layer component. CNCM can establish structural characteristics of stripe noise and utilize contextual information at long-range dependencies to distinguish stripes with varying intensities and distributions. Extensive experiments on synthetic data, real data, and infrared small target detection tasks show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art single-image destriping methods both visually and quantitatively by a considerable margin. Our code will be made publicly available at \url{https://github.com/xdFai}.

Faster Diffusion: Rethinking the Role of UNet Encoder in Diffusion Models

One of the key components within diffusion models is the UNet for noise prediction. While several works have explored basic properties of the UNet decoder, its encoder largely remains unexplored. In this work, we conduct the first comprehensive study of the UNet encoder. We empirically analyze the encoder features and provide insights to important questions regarding their changes at the inference process. In particular, we find that encoder features change gently, whereas the decoder features exhibit substantial variations across different time-steps. This finding inspired us to omit the encoder at certain adjacent time-steps and reuse cyclically the encoder features in the previous time-steps for the decoder. Further based on this observation, we introduce a simple yet effective encoder propagation scheme to accelerate the diffusion sampling for a diverse set of tasks. By benefiting from our propagation scheme, we are able to perform in parallel the decoder at certain adjacent time-steps. Additionally, we introduce a prior noise injection method to improve the texture details in the generated image. Besides the standard text-to-image task, we also validate our approach on other tasks: text-to-video, personalized generation and reference-guided generation. Without utilizing any knowledge distillation technique, our approach accelerates both the Stable Diffusion (SD) and the DeepFloyd-IF models sampling by 41$\%$ and 24$\%$ respectively, while maintaining high-quality generation performance. Our code is available in \href{https://github.com/hutaiHang/Faster-Diffusion}{FasterDiffusion}.

MaTe3D: Mask-guided Text-based 3D-aware Portrait Editing

Recently, 3D-aware face editing has witnessed remarkable progress. Although current approaches successfully perform mask-guided or text-based editing, these properties have not been combined into a single method. To address this limitation, we propose \textbf{MaTe3D}: mask-guided text-based 3D-aware portrait editing. First, we propose a new SDF-based 3D generator. To better perform masked-based editing (mainly happening in local areas), we propose SDF and density consistency losses, aiming to effectively model both the global and local representations jointly. Second, we introduce an inference-optimized method. We introduce two techniques based on the SDS (Score Distillation Sampling), including a blending SDS and a conditional SDS. The former aims to overcome the mismatch problem between geometry and appearance, ultimately harming fidelity. The conditional SDS contributes to further producing satisfactory and stable results. Additionally, we create CatMask-HQ dataset, a large-scale high-resolution cat face annotations. We perform experiments on both the FFHQ and CatMask-HQ datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Our method generates faithfully a edited 3D-aware face image given a modified mask and a text prompt. Our code and models will be publicly released.

Alleviating Behavior Data Imbalance for Multi-Behavior Graph Collaborative Filtering

Graph collaborative filtering, which learns user and item representations through message propagation over the user-item interaction graph, has been shown to effectively enhance recommendation performance. However, most current graph collaborative filtering models mainly construct the interaction graph on a single behavior domain (e.g. click), even though users exhibit various types of behaviors on real-world platforms, including actions like click, cart, and purchase. Furthermore, due to variations in user engagement, there exists an imbalance in the scale of different types of behaviors. For instance, users may click and view multiple items but only make selective purchases from a small subset of them. How to alleviate the behavior imbalance problem and utilize information from the multiple behavior graphs concurrently to improve the target behavior conversion (e.g. purchase) remains underexplored. To this end, we propose IMGCF, a simple but effective model to alleviate behavior data imbalance for multi-behavior graph collaborative filtering. Specifically, IMGCF utilizes a multi-task learning framework for collaborative filtering on multi-behavior graphs. Then, to mitigate the data imbalance issue, IMGCF improves representation learning on the sparse behavior by leveraging representations learned from the behavior domain with abundant data volumes. Experiments on two widely-used multi-behavior datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of IMGCF.

Dynamic Prompt Learning: Addressing Cross-Attention Leakage for Text-Based Image Editing

Large-scale text-to-image generative models have been a ground-breaking development in generative AI, with diffusion models showing their astounding ability to synthesize convincing images following an input text prompt. The goal of image editing research is to give users control over the generated images by modifying the text prompt. Current image editing techniques are susceptible to unintended modifications of regions outside the targeted area, such as on the background or on distractor objects which have some semantic or visual relationship with the targeted object. According to our experimental findings, inaccurate cross-attention maps are at the root of this problem. Based on this observation, we propose Dynamic Prompt Learning (DPL) to force cross-attention maps to focus on correct noun words in the text prompt. By updating the dynamic tokens for nouns in the textual input with the proposed leakage repairment losses, we achieve fine-grained image editing over particular objects while preventing undesired changes to other image regions. Our method DPL, based on the publicly available Stable Diffusion, is extensively evaluated on a wide range of images, and consistently obtains superior results both quantitatively (CLIP score, Structure-Dist) and qualitatively (on user-evaluation). We show improved prompt editing results for Word-Swap, Prompt Refinement, and Attention Re-weighting, especially for complex multi-object scenes.

Trust your Good Friends: Source-free Domain Adaptation by Reciprocal Neighborhood Clustering

Domain adaptation (DA) aims to alleviate the domain shift between source domain and target domain. Most DA methods require access to the source data, but often that is not possible (e.g. due to data privacy or intellectual property). In this paper, we address the challenging source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) problem, where the source pretrained model is adapted to the target domain in the absence of source data. Our method is based on the observation that target data, which might not align with the source domain classifier, still forms clear clusters. We capture this intrinsic structure by defining local affinity of the target data, and encourage label consistency among data with high local affinity. We observe that higher affinity should be assigned to reciprocal neighbors. To aggregate information with more context, we consider expanded neighborhoods with small affinity values. Furthermore, we consider the density around each target sample, which can alleviate the negative impact of potential outliers. In the experimental results we verify that the inherent structure of the target features is an important source of information for domain adaptation. We demonstrate that this local structure can be efficiently captured by considering the local neighbors, the reciprocal neighbors, and the expanded neighborhood. Finally, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on several 2D image and 3D point cloud recognition datasets.

A Critical Look at the Current Usage of Foundation Model for Dense Recognition Task

In recent years large model trained on huge amount of cross-modality data, which is usually be termed as foundation model, achieves conspicuous accomplishment in many fields, such as image recognition and generation. Though achieving great success in their original application case, it is still unclear whether those foundation models can be applied to other different downstream tasks. In this paper, we conduct a short survey on the current methods for discriminative dense recognition tasks, which are built on the pretrained foundation model. And we also provide some preliminary experimental analysis of an existing open-vocabulary segmentation method based on Stable Diffusion, which indicates the current way of deploying diffusion model for segmentation is not optimal. This aims to provide insights for future research on adopting foundation model for downstream task.

Design and Verification of a Novel Triphibian Platform

Multi-modal robots expand their operations from one working media to another, land to air for example. The majorities multi-modal robots mainly refer to platforms that operate in two different media. However, for all-terrain tasks, there is seldom research to date in the literature. In this paper, we proposed a triphibian robotic platform aiming at solving the challenges of different propulsion systems and immensely varied working media. In our design, three ducted fans are adopted to unify the propulsion system and provide the robot with driving forces to perform all-terrain operations. A morphable mechanism is designed to enable the transition between different motion modes, and specifically, a cylindrical body is implemented as the rolling mechanism in land mode. Detailed design principles of different mechanisms and the transition between various locomotion modes are analyzed in detail. Finally, a triphibian robot prototype is fabricated and tested in various working media with mono-modal and multi-modal functionalities. Experiments have verified our platform, and the results show promising adaptions for future exploration tasks in different working scenarios.