AVSegFormer: Audio-Visual Segmentation with Transformer

The combination of audio and vision has long been a topic of interest in the multi-modal community. Recently, a new audio-visual segmentation (AVS) task has been introduced, aiming to locate and segment the sounding objects in a given video. This task demands audio-driven pixel-level scene understanding for the first time, posing significant challenges. In this paper, we propose AVSegFormer, a novel framework for AVS tasks that leverages the transformer architecture. Specifically, we introduce audio queries and learnable queries into the transformer decoder, enabling the network to selectively attend to interested visual features. Besides, we present an audio-visual mixer, which can dynamically adjust visual features by amplifying relevant and suppressing irrelevant spatial channels. Additionally, we devise an intermediate mask loss to enhance the supervision of the decoder, encouraging the network to produce more accurate intermediate predictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AVSegFormer achieves state-of-the-art results on the AVS benchmark. The code is available at https://github.com/vvvb-github/AVSegFormer.

GridFormer: Residual Dense Transformer with Grid Structure for Image Restoration in Adverse Weather Conditions

Image restoration in adverse weather conditions is a difficult task in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a novel transformer-based framework called GridFormer which serves as a backbone for image restoration under adverse weather conditions. GridFormer is designed in a grid structure using a residual dense transformer block, and it introduces two core designs. First, it uses an enhanced attention mechanism in the transformer layer. The mechanism includes stages of the sampler and compact self-attention to improve efficiency, and a local enhancement stage to strengthen local information. Second, we introduce a residual dense transformer block (RDTB) as the final GridFormer layer. This design further improves the network's ability to learn effective features from both preceding and current local features. The GridFormer framework achieves state-of-the-art results on five diverse image restoration tasks in adverse weather conditions, including image deraining, dehazing, deraining & dehazing, desnowing, and multi-weather restoration. The source code and pre-trained models will be released.

VisionLLM: Large Language Model is also an Open-Ended Decoder for Vision-Centric Tasks

Large language models (LLMs) have notably accelerated progress towards artificial general intelligence (AGI), with their impressive zero-shot capacity for user-tailored tasks, endowing them with immense potential across a range of applications. However, in the field of computer vision, despite the availability of numerous powerful vision foundation models (VFMs), they are still restricted to tasks in a pre-defined form, struggling to match the open-ended task capabilities of LLMs. In this work, we present an LLM-based framework for vision-centric tasks, termed VisionLLM. This framework provides a unified perspective for vision and language tasks by treating images as a foreign language and aligning vision-centric tasks with language tasks that can be flexibly defined and managed using language instructions. An LLM-based decoder can then make appropriate predictions based on these instructions for open-ended tasks. Extensive experiments show that the proposed VisionLLM can achieve different levels of task customization through language instructions, from fine-grained object-level to coarse-grained task-level customization, all with good results. It's noteworthy that, with a generalist LLM-based framework, our model can achieve over 60\% mAP on COCO, on par with detection-specific models. We hope this model can set a new baseline for generalist vision and language models. The demo shall be released based on https://github.com/OpenGVLab/InternGPT. The code shall be released at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/VisionLLM.

VideoLLM: Modeling Video Sequence with Large Language Models

With the exponential growth of video data, there is an urgent need for automated technology to analyze and comprehend video content. However, existing video understanding models are often task-specific and lack a comprehensive capability of handling diverse tasks. The success of large language models (LLMs) like GPT has demonstrated their impressive abilities in sequence causal reasoning. Building upon this insight, we propose a novel framework called VideoLLM that leverages the sequence reasoning capabilities of pre-trained LLMs from natural language processing (NLP) for video sequence understanding. VideoLLM incorporates a carefully designed Modality Encoder and Semantic Translator, which convert inputs from various modalities into a unified token sequence. This token sequence is then fed into a decoder-only LLM. Subsequently, with the aid of a simple task head, our VideoLLM yields an effective unified framework for different kinds of video understanding tasks. To evaluate the efficacy of VideoLLM, we conduct extensive experiments using multiple LLMs and fine-tuning methods. We evaluate our VideoLLM on eight tasks sourced from four different datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the understanding and reasoning capabilities of LLMs can be effectively transferred to video understanding tasks. We release the code at https://github.com/cg1177/VideoLLM.

Graph Propagation Transformer for Graph Representation Learning

This paper presents a novel transformer architecture for graph representation learning. The core insight of our method is to fully consider the information propagation among nodes and edges in a graph when building the attention module in the transformer blocks. Specifically, we propose a new attention mechanism called Graph Propagation Attention (GPA). It explicitly passes the information among nodes and edges in three ways, i.e. node-to-node, node-to-edge, and edge-to-node, which is essential for learning graph-structured data. On this basis, we design an effective transformer architecture named Graph Propagation Transformer (GPTrans) to further help learn graph data. We verify the performance of GPTrans in a wide range of graph learning experiments on several benchmark datasets. These results show that our method outperforms many state-of-the-art transformer-based graph models with better performance. The code will be released at https://github.com/czczup/GPTrans.

MRSN: Multi-Relation Support Network for Video Action Detection

Action detection is a challenging video understanding task, requiring modeling spatio-temporal and interaction relations. Current methods usually model actor-actor and actor-context relations separately, ignoring their complementarity and mutual support. To solve this problem, we propose a novel network called Multi-Relation Support Network (MRSN). In MRSN, Actor-Context Relation Encoder (ACRE) and Actor-Actor Relation Encoder (AARE) model the actor-context and actor-actor relation separately. Then Relation Support Encoder (RSE) computes the supports between the two relations and performs relation-level interactions. Finally, Relation Consensus Module (RCM) enhances two relations with the long-term relations from the Long-term Relation Bank (LRB) and yields a consensus. Our experiments demonstrate that modeling relations separately and performing relation-level interactions can achieve and outperformer state-of-the-art results on two challenging video datasets: AVA and UCF101-24.

DDP: Diffusion Model for Dense Visual Prediction

We propose a simple, efficient, yet powerful framework for dense visual predictions based on the conditional diffusion pipeline. Our approach follows a "noise-to-map" generative paradigm for prediction by progressively removing noise from a random Gaussian distribution, guided by the image. The method, called DDP, efficiently extends the denoising diffusion process into the modern perception pipeline. Without task-specific design and architecture customization, DDP is easy to generalize to most dense prediction tasks, e.g., semantic segmentation and depth estimation. In addition, DDP shows attractive properties such as dynamic inference and uncertainty awareness, in contrast to previous single-step discriminative methods. We show top results on three representative tasks with six diverse benchmarks, without tricks, DDP achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on each task compared to the specialist counterparts. For example, semantic segmentation (83.9 mIoU on Cityscapes), BEV map segmentation (70.6 mIoU on nuScenes), and depth estimation (0.05 REL on KITTI). We hope that our approach will serve as a solid baseline and facilitate future research

Champion Solution for the WSDM2023 Toloka VQA Challenge

In this report, we present our champion solution to the WSDM2023 Toloka Visual Question Answering (VQA) Challenge. Different from the common VQA and visual grounding (VG) tasks, this challenge involves a more complex scenario, i.e. inferring and locating the object implicitly specified by the given interrogative question. For this task, we leverage ViT-Adapter, a pre-training-free adapter network, to adapt multi-modal pre-trained Uni-Perceiver for better cross-modal localization. Our method ranks first on the leaderboard, achieving 77.5 and 76.347 IoU on public and private test sets, respectively. It shows that ViT-Adapter is also an effective paradigm for adapting the unified perception model to vision-language downstream tasks. Code and models will be released at https://github.com/czczup/ViT-Adapter/tree/main/wsdm2023.

Restoring Vision in Hazy Weather with Hierarchical Contrastive Learning

Image restoration under hazy weather condition, which is called single image dehazing, has been of significant interest for various computer vision applications. In recent years, deep learning-based methods have achieved success. However, existing image dehazing methods typically neglect the hierarchy of features in the neural network and fail to exploit their relationships fully. To this end, we propose an effective image dehazing method named Hierarchical Contrastive Dehazing (HCD), which is based on feature fusion and contrastive learning strategies. HCD consists of a hierarchical dehazing network (HDN) and a novel hierarchical contrastive loss (HCL). Specifically, the core design in the HDN is a Hierarchical Interaction Module, which utilizes multi-scale activation to revise the feature responses hierarchically. To cooperate with the training of HDN, we propose HCL which performs contrastive learning on hierarchically paired exemplars, facilitating haze removal. Extensive experiments on public datasets, RESIDE, HazeRD, and DENSE-HAZE, demonstrate that HCD quantitatively outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of PSNR, SSIM and achieves better visual quality.

Ultra-High-Definition Low-Light Image Enhancement: A Benchmark and Transformer-Based Method

As the quality of optical sensors improves, there is a need for processing large-scale images. In particular, the ability of devices to capture ultra-high definition (UHD) images and video places new demands on the image processing pipeline. In this paper, we consider the task of low-light image enhancement (LLIE) and introduce a large-scale database consisting of images at 4K and 8K resolution. We conduct systematic benchmarking studies and provide a comparison of current LLIE algorithms. As a second contribution, we introduce LLFormer, a transformer-based low-light enhancement method. The core components of LLFormer are the axis-based multi-head self-attention and cross-layer attention fusion block, which significantly reduces the linear complexity. Extensive experiments on the new dataset and existing public datasets show that LLFormer outperforms state-of-the-art methods. We also show that employing existing LLIE methods trained on our benchmark as a pre-processing step significantly improves the performance of downstream tasks, e.g., face detection in low-light conditions. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/TaoWangzj/LLFormer.