The Ninth NTIRE 2024 Efficient Super-Resolution Challenge Report

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the NTIRE 2024 challenge, focusing on efficient single-image super-resolution (ESR) solutions and their outcomes. The task of this challenge is to super-resolve an input image with a magnification factor of x4 based on pairs of low and corresponding high-resolution images. The primary objective is to develop networks that optimize various aspects such as runtime, parameters, and FLOPs, while still maintaining a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of approximately 26.90 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_valid dataset and 26.99 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_test dataset. In addition, this challenge has 4 tracks including the main track (overall performance), sub-track 1 (runtime), sub-track 2 (FLOPs), and sub-track 3 (parameters). In the main track, all three metrics (ie runtime, FLOPs, and parameter count) were considered. The ranking of the main track is calculated based on a weighted sum-up of the scores of all other sub-tracks. In sub-track 1, the practical runtime performance of the submissions was evaluated, and the corresponding score was used to determine the ranking. In sub-track 2, the number of FLOPs was considered. The score calculated based on the corresponding FLOPs was used to determine the ranking. In sub-track 3, the number of parameters was considered. The score calculated based on the corresponding parameters was used to determine the ranking. RLFN is set as the baseline for efficiency measurement. The challenge had 262 registered participants, and 34 teams made valid submissions. They gauge the state-of-the-art in efficient single-image super-resolution. To facilitate the reproducibility of the challenge and enable other researchers to build upon these findings, the code and the pre-trained model of validated solutions are made publicly available at https://github.com/Amazingren/NTIRE2024_ESR/.

Exploring the Intersection of Complex Aesthetics and Generative AI for Promoting Cultural Creativity in Rural China after the Post-Pandemic Era

This paper explores using generative AI and aesthetics to promote cultural creativity in rural China amidst COVID-19's impact. Through literature reviews, case studies, surveys, and text analysis, it examines art and technology applications in rural contexts and identifies key challenges. The study finds artworks often fail to resonate locally, while reliance on external artists limits sustainability. Hence, nurturing grassroots "artist villagers" through AI is proposed. Our approach involves training machine learning on subjective aesthetics to generate culturally relevant content. Interactive AI media can also boost tourism while preserving heritage. This pioneering research puts forth original perspectives on the intersection of AI and aesthetics to invigorate rural culture. It advocates holistic integration of technology and emphasizes AI's potential as a creative enabler versus replacement. Ultimately, it lays the groundwork for further exploration of leveraging AI innovations to empower rural communities. This timely study contributes to growing interest in emerging technologies to address critical issues facing rural China.

$\mathcal{G}^2Pxy$: Generative Open-Set Node Classification on Graphs with Proxy Unknowns

Node classification is the task of predicting the labels of unlabeled nodes in a graph. State-of-the-art methods based on graph neural networks achieve excellent performance when all labels are available during training. But in real-life, models are often applied on data with new classes, which can lead to massive misclassification and thus significantly degrade performance. Hence, developing open-set classification methods is crucial to determine if a given sample belongs to a known class. Existing methods for open-set node classification generally use transductive learning with part or all of the features of real unseen class nodes to help with open-set classification. In this paper, we propose a novel generative open-set node classification method, i.e. $\mathcal{G}^2Pxy$, which follows a stricter inductive learning setting where no information about unknown classes is available during training and validation. Two kinds of proxy unknown nodes, inter-class unknown proxies and external unknown proxies are generated via mixup to efficiently anticipate the distribution of novel classes. Using the generated proxies, a closed-set classifier can be transformed into an open-set one, by augmenting it with an extra proxy classifier. Under the constraints of both cross entropy loss and complement entropy loss, $\mathcal{G}^2Pxy$ achieves superior effectiveness for unknown class detection and known class classification, which is validated by experiments on benchmark graph datasets. Moreover, $\mathcal{G}^2Pxy$ does not have specific requirement on the GNN architecture and shows good generalizations.

Entropy Neural Estimation for Graph Contrastive Learning

Contrastive learning on graphs aims at extracting distinguishable high-level representations of nodes. In this paper, we theoretically illustrate that the entropy of a dataset can be approximated by maximizing the lower bound of the mutual information across different views of a graph, \ie, entropy is estimated by a neural network. Based on this finding, we propose a simple yet effective subset sampling strategy to contrast pairwise representations between views of a dataset. In particular, we randomly sample nodes and edges from a given graph to build the input subset for a view. Two views are fed into a parameter-shared Siamese network to extract the high-dimensional embeddings and estimate the information entropy of the entire graph. For the learning process, we propose to optimize the network using two objectives, simultaneously. Concretely, the input of the contrastive loss function consists of positive and negative pairs. Our selection strategy of pairs is different from previous works and we present a novel strategy to enhance the representation ability of the graph encoder by selecting nodes based on cross-view similarities. We enrich the diversity of the positive and negative pairs by selecting highly similar samples and totally different data with the guidance of cross-view similarity scores, respectively. We also introduce a cross-view consistency constraint on the representations generated from the different views. This objective guarantees the learned representations are consistent across views from the perspective of the entire graph. We conduct extensive experiments on seven graph benchmarks, and the proposed approach achieves competitive performance compared to the current state-of-the-art methods. The source code will be publicly released once this paper is accepted.

Improving Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Dual-Level Siamese Structure Network

Semi-supervised semantic segmentation (SSS) is an important task that utilizes both labeled and unlabeled data to reduce expenses on labeling training examples. However, the effectiveness of SSS algorithms is limited by the difficulty of fully exploiting the potential of unlabeled data. To address this, we propose a dual-level Siamese structure network (DSSN) for pixel-wise contrastive learning. By aligning positive pairs with a pixel-wise contrastive loss using strong augmented views in both low-level image space and high-level feature space, the proposed DSSN is designed to maximize the utilization of available unlabeled data. Additionally, we introduce a novel class-aware pseudo-label selection strategy for weak-to-strong supervision, which addresses the limitations of most existing methods that do not perform selection or apply a predefined threshold for all classes. Specifically, our strategy selects the top high-confidence prediction of the weak view for each class to generate pseudo labels that supervise the strong augmented views. This strategy is capable of taking into account the class imbalance and improving the performance of long-tailed classes. Our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on two datasets, PASCAL VOC 2012 and Cityscapes, outperforming other SSS algorithms by a significant margin.

Mutual Exclusive Modulator for Long-Tailed Recognition

The long-tailed recognition (LTR) is the task of learning high-performance classifiers given extremely imbalanced training samples between categories. Most of the existing works address the problem by either enhancing the features of tail classes or re-balancing the classifiers to reduce the inductive bias. In this paper, we try to look into the root cause of the LTR task, i.e., training samples for each class are greatly imbalanced, and propose a straightforward solution. We split the categories into three groups, i.e., many, medium and few, according to the number of training images. The three groups of categories are separately predicted to reduce the difficulty for classification. This idea naturally arises a new problem of how to assign a given sample to the right class groups? We introduce a mutual exclusive modulator which can estimate the probability of an image belonging to each group. Particularly, the modulator consists of a light-weight module and learned with a mutual exclusive objective. Hence, the output probabilities of the modulator encode the data volume clues of the training dataset. They are further utilized as prior information to guide the prediction of the classifier. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple datasets, e.g., ImageNet-LT, Place-LT and iNaturalist 2018 to evaluate the proposed approach. Our method achieves competitive performance compared to the state-of-the-art benchmarks.

Pyramid Fusion Transformer for Semantic Segmentation

The recently proposed MaskFormer \cite{maskformer} gives a refreshed perspective on the task of semantic segmentation: it shifts from the popular pixel-level classification paradigm to a mask-level classification method. In essence, it generates paired probabilities and masks corresponding to category segments and combines them during inference for the segmentation maps. The segmentation quality thus relies on how well the queries can capture the semantic information for categories and their spatial locations within the images. In our study, we find that per-mask classification decoder on top of a single-scale feature is not effective enough to extract reliable probability or mask. To mine for rich semantic information across the feature pyramid, we propose a transformer-based Pyramid Fusion Transformer (PFT) for per-mask approach semantic segmentation on top of multi-scale features. To efficiently utilize image features of different resolutions without incurring too much computational overheads, PFT uses a multi-scale transformer decoder with cross-scale inter-query attention to exchange complimentary information. Extensive experimental evaluations and ablations demonstrate the efficacy of our framework. In particular, we achieve a 3.2 mIoU improvement on COCO-Stuff 10K dataset with ResNet-101c compared to MaskFormer. Besides, on ADE20K validation set, our result with Swin-B backbone matches that of MaskFormer's with a much larger Swin-L backbone in both single-scale and multi-scale inference, achieving 54.1 mIoU and 55.3 mIoU respectively. Using a Swin-L backbone, we achieve 56.0 mIoU single-scale result on the ADE20K validation set and 57.2 multi-scale result, obtaining state-of-the-art performance on the dataset.

Inter-Image Communication for Weakly Supervised Localization

Weakly supervised localization aims at finding target object regions using only image-level supervision. However, localization maps extracted from classification networks are often not accurate due to the lack of fine pixel-level supervision. In this paper, we propose to leverage pixel-level similarities across different objects for learning more accurate object locations in a complementary way. Particularly, two kinds of constraints are proposed to prompt the consistency of object features within the same categories. The first constraint is to learn the stochastic feature consistency among discriminative pixels that are randomly sampled from different images within a batch. The discriminative information embedded in one image can be leveraged to benefit its counterpart with inter-image communication. The second constraint is to learn the global consistency of object features throughout the entire dataset. We learn a feature center for each category and realize the global feature consistency by forcing the object features to approach class-specific centers. The global centers are actively updated with the training process. The two constraints can benefit each other to learn consistent pixel-level features within the same categories, and finally improve the quality of localization maps. We conduct extensive experiments on two popular benchmarks, i.e., ILSVRC and CUB-200-2011. Our method achieves the Top-1 localization error rate of 45.17% on the ILSVRC validation set, surpassing the current state-of-the-art method by a large margin. The code is available at https://github.com/xiaomengyc/I2C.

SASO: Joint 3D Semantic-Instance Segmentation via Multi-scale Semantic Association and Salient Point Clustering Optimization

We propose a novel 3D point cloud segmentation framework named SASO, which jointly performs semantic and instance segmentation tasks. For semantic segmentation task, inspired by the inherent correlation among objects in spatial context, we propose a Multi-scale Semantic Association (MSA) module to explore the constructive effects of the semantic context information. For instance segmentation task, different from previous works that utilize clustering only in inference procedure, we propose a Salient Point Clustering Optimization (SPCO) module to introduce a clustering procedure into the training process and impel the network focusing on points that are difficult to be distinguished. In addition, because of the inherent structures of indoor scenes, the imbalance problem of the category distribution is rarely considered but severely limits the performance of 3D scene perception. To address this issue, we introduce an adaptive Water Filling Sampling (WFS) algorithm to balance the category distribution of training data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets in both semantic segmentation and instance segmentation tasks.

Rethinking Localization Map: Towards Accurate Object Perception with Self-Enhancement Maps

Recently, remarkable progress has been made in weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) to promote object localization maps. The common practice of evaluating these maps applies an indirect and coarse way, i.e., obtaining tight bounding boxes which can cover high-activation regions and calculating intersection-over-union (IoU) scores between the predicted and ground-truth boxes. This measurement can evaluate the ability of localization maps to some extent, but we argue that the maps should be measured directly and delicately, i.e., comparing the maps with the ground-truth object masks pixel-wisely. To fulfill the direct evaluation, we annotate pixel-level object masks on the ILSVRC validation set. We propose to use IoU-Threshold curves for evaluating the real quality of localization maps. Beyond the amended evaluation metric and annotated object masks, this work also introduces a novel self-enhancement method to harvest accurate object localization maps and object boundaries with only category labels as supervision. We propose a two-stage approach to generate the localization maps by simply comparing the similarity of point-wise features between the high-activation and the rest pixels. Based on the predicted localization maps, we explore to estimate object boundaries on a very large dataset. A hard-negative suppression loss is proposed for obtaining fine boundaries. We conduct extensive experiments on the ILSVRC and CUB benchmarks. In particular, the proposed Self-Enhancement Maps achieve the state-of-the-art localization accuracy of 54.88% on ILSVRC. The code and the annotated masks are released at https://github.com/xiaomengyc/SEM.