Class-Aware Mask-Guided Feature Refinement for Scene Text Recognition

Scene text recognition is a rapidly developing field that faces numerous challenges due to the complexity and diversity of scene text, including complex backgrounds, diverse fonts, flexible arrangements, and accidental occlusions. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Class-Aware Mask-guided feature refinement (CAM) to address these challenges. Our approach introduces canonical class-aware glyph masks generated from a standard font to effectively suppress background and text style noise, thereby enhancing feature discrimination. Additionally, we design a feature alignment and fusion module to incorporate the canonical mask guidance for further feature refinement for text recognition. By enhancing the alignment between the canonical mask feature and the text feature, the module ensures more effective fusion, ultimately leading to improved recognition performance. We first evaluate CAM on six standard text recognition benchmarks to demonstrate its effectiveness. Furthermore, CAM exhibits superiority over the state-of-the-art method by an average performance gain of 4.1% across six more challenging datasets, despite utilizing a smaller model size. Our study highlights the importance of incorporating canonical mask guidance and aligned feature refinement techniques for robust scene text recognition. The code is available at https://github.com/MelosY/CAM.

PointMamba: A Simple State Space Model for Point Cloud Analysis

Transformers have become one of the foundational architectures in point cloud analysis tasks due to their excellent global modeling ability. However, the attention mechanism has quadratic complexity and is difficult to extend to long sequence modeling due to limited computational resources and so on. Recently, state space models (SSM), a new family of deep sequence models, have presented great potential for sequence modeling in NLP tasks. In this paper, taking inspiration from the success of SSM in NLP, we propose PointMamba, a framework with global modeling and linear complexity. Specifically, by taking embedded point patches as input, we proposed a reordering strategy to enhance SSM's global modeling ability by providing a more logical geometric scanning order. The reordered point tokens are then sent to a series of Mamba blocks to causally capture the point cloud structure. Experimental results show our proposed PointMamba outperforms the transformer-based counterparts on different point cloud analysis datasets, while significantly saving about 44.3% parameters and 25% FLOPs, demonstrating the potential option for constructing foundational 3D vision models. We hope our PointMamba can provide a new perspective for point cloud analysis. The code is available at https://github.com/LMD0311/PointMamba.

CauESC: A Causal Aware Model for Emotional Support Conversation

Emotional Support Conversation aims at reducing the seeker's emotional distress through supportive response. Existing approaches have two limitations: (1) They ignore the emotion causes of the distress, which is important for fine-grained emotion understanding; (2) They focus on the seeker's own mental state rather than the emotional dynamics during interaction between speakers. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework CauESC, which firstly recognizes the emotion causes of the distress, as well as the emotion effects triggered by the causes, and then understands each strategy of verbal grooming independently and integrates them skillfully. Experimental results on the benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and show the benefits of emotion understanding from cause to effect and independent-integrated strategy modeling.

An open dataset for oracle bone script recognition and decipherment

Oracle Bone Script (OBS), one of the earliest known forms of ancient Chinese writing, holds invaluable insights into the humanities and geography of the Shang Dynasty, dating back 3,000 years. The immense historical and cultural significance of these writings cannot be overstated. However, the passage of time has obscured much of their meaning, presenting a significant challenge in deciphering these ancient texts. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), employing AI to assist in interpreting OBS has become a feasible option. Yet, progress in this area has been hindered by a lack of high-quality datasets. To address this issue, this paper details the creation of the HUST-OBS dataset. This dataset encompasses 77,064 images of 1,588 individual deciphered scripts and 62,989 images of 9,411 undeciphered characters, with a total of 140,053 images, compiled from diverse sources. Additionally, all images and labels have been reviewed and corrected by experts in oracle bone studies. The hope is that this dataset could inspire and assist future research in deciphering those unknown OBS.

You Only Look Bottom-Up for Monocular 3D Object Detection

Monocular 3D Object Detection is an essential task for autonomous driving. Meanwhile, accurate 3D object detection from pure images is very challenging due to the loss of depth information. Most existing image-based methods infer objects' location in 3D space based on their 2D sizes on the image plane, which usually ignores the intrinsic position clues from images, leading to unsatisfactory performances. Motivated by the fact that humans could leverage the bottom-up positional clues to locate objects in 3D space from a single image, in this paper, we explore the position modeling from the image feature column and propose a new method named You Only Look Bottum-Up (YOLOBU). Specifically, our YOLOBU leverages Column-based Cross Attention to determine how much a pixel contributes to pixels above it. Next, the Row-based Reverse Cumulative Sum (RRCS) is introduced to build the connections of pixels in the bottom-up direction. Our YOLOBU fully explores the position clues for monocular 3D detection via building the relationship of pixels from the bottom-up way. Extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method.

An open dataset for the evolution of oracle bone characters: EVOBC

The earliest extant Chinese characters originate from oracle bone inscriptions, which are closely related to other East Asian languages. These inscriptions hold immense value for anthropology and archaeology. However, deciphering oracle bone script remains a formidable challenge, with only approximately 1,600 of the over 4,500 extant characters elucidated to date. Further scholarly investigation is required to comprehensively understand this ancient writing system. Artificial Intelligence technology is a promising avenue for deciphering oracle bone characters, particularly concerning their evolution. However, one of the challenges is the lack of datasets mapping the evolution of these characters over time. In this study, we systematically collected ancient characters from authoritative texts and websites spanning six historical stages: Oracle Bone Characters - OBC (15th century B.C.), Bronze Inscriptions - BI (13th to 221 B.C.), Seal Script - SS (11th to 8th centuries B.C.), Spring and Autumn period Characters - SAC (770 to 476 B.C.), Warring States period Characters - WSC (475 B.C. to 221 B.C.), and Clerical Script - CS (221 B.C. to 220 A.D.). Subsequently, we constructed an extensive dataset, namely EVolution Oracle Bone Characters (EVOBC), consisting of 229,170 images representing 13,714 distinct character categories. We conducted validation and simulated deciphering on the constructed dataset, and the results demonstrate its high efficacy in aiding the study of oracle bone script. This openly accessible dataset aims to digitalize ancient Chinese scripts across multiple eras, facilitating the decipherment of oracle bone script by examining the evolution of glyph forms.

SwinTextSpotter v2: Towards Better Synergy for Scene Text Spotting

End-to-end scene text spotting, which aims to read the text in natural images, has garnered significant attention in recent years. However, recent state-of-the-art methods usually incorporate detection and recognition simply by sharing the backbone, which does not directly take advantage of the feature interaction between the two tasks. In this paper, we propose a new end-to-end scene text spotting framework termed SwinTextSpotter v2, which seeks to find a better synergy between text detection and recognition. Specifically, we enhance the relationship between two tasks using novel Recognition Conversion and Recognition Alignment modules. Recognition Conversion explicitly guides text localization through recognition loss, while Recognition Alignment dynamically extracts text features for recognition through the detection predictions. This simple yet effective design results in a concise framework that requires neither an additional rectification module nor character-level annotations for the arbitrarily-shaped text. Furthermore, the parameters of the detector are greatly reduced without performance degradation by introducing a Box Selection Schedule. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that SwinTextSpotter v2 achieved state-of-the-art performance on various multilingual (English, Chinese, and Vietnamese) benchmarks. The code will be available at \href{https://github.com/mxin262/SwinTextSpotterv2}{SwinTextSpotter v2}.

Progressive Evolution from Single-Point to Polygon for Scene Text

The advancement of text shape representations towards compactness has enhanced text detection and spotting performance, but at a high annotation cost. Current models use single-point annotations to reduce costs, yet they lack sufficient localization information for downstream applications. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Point2Polygon, which can efficiently transform single-points into compact polygons. Our method uses a coarse-to-fine process, starting with creating and selecting anchor points based on recognition confidence, then vertically and horizontally refining the polygon using recognition information to optimize its shape. We demonstrate the accuracy of the generated polygons through extensive experiments: 1) By creating polygons from ground truth points, we achieved an accuracy of 82.0% on ICDAR 2015; 2) In training detectors with polygons generated by our method, we attained 86% of the accuracy relative to training with ground truth (GT); 3) Additionally, the proposed Point2Polygon can be seamlessly integrated to empower single-point spotters to generate polygons. This integration led to an impressive 82.5% accuracy for the generated polygons. It is worth mentioning that our method relies solely on synthetic recognition information, eliminating the need for any manual annotation beyond single points.

K-ESConv: Knowledge Injection for Emotional Support Dialogue Systems via Prompt Learning

Automatic psychological counseling requires mass of professional knowledge that can be found in online counseling forums. Motivated by this, we propose K-ESConv, a novel prompt learning based knowledge injection method for emotional support dialogue system, transferring forum knowledge to response generation. We evaluate our model on an emotional support dataset ESConv, where the model retrieves and incorporates knowledge from external professional emotional Q\&A forum. Experiment results show that the proposed method outperforms existing baselines on both automatic evaluation and human evaluation, which shows that our approach significantly improves the correlation and diversity of responses and provides more comfort and better suggestion for the seeker.