Universal Segmentation at Arbitrary Granularity with Language Instruction

This paper aims to achieve universal segmentation of arbitrary semantic level. Despite significant progress in recent years, specialist segmentation approaches are limited to specific tasks and data distribution. Retraining a new model for adaptation to new scenarios or settings takes expensive computation and time cost, which raises the demand for versatile and universal segmentation model that can cater to various granularity. Although some attempts have been made for unifying different segmentation tasks or generalization to various scenarios, limitations in the definition of paradigms and input-output spaces make it difficult for them to achieve accurate understanding of content at arbitrary granularity. To this end, we present UniLSeg, a universal segmentation model that can perform segmentation at any semantic level with the guidance of language instructions. For training UniLSeg, we reorganize a group of tasks from original diverse distributions into a unified data format, where images with texts describing segmentation targets as input and corresponding masks are output. Combined with a automatic annotation engine for utilizing numerous unlabeled data, UniLSeg achieves excellent performance on various tasks and settings, surpassing both specialist and unified segmentation models.

Segment and Caption Anything

We propose a method to efficiently equip the Segment Anything Model (SAM) with the ability to generate regional captions. SAM presents strong generalizability to segment anything while is short for semantic understanding. By introducing a lightweight query-based feature mixer, we align the region-specific features with the embedding space of language models for later caption generation. As the number of trainable parameters is small (typically in the order of tens of millions), it costs less computation, less memory usage, and less communication bandwidth, resulting in both fast and scalable training. To address the scarcity problem of regional caption data, we propose to first pre-train our model on objection detection and segmentation tasks. We call this step weak supervision pretraining since the pre-training data only contains category names instead of full-sentence descriptions. The weak supervision pretraining allows us to leverage many publicly available object detection and segmentation datasets. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the superiority of our method and validate each design choice. This work serves as a stepping stone towards scaling up regional captioning data and sheds light on exploring efficient ways to augment SAM with regional semantics. The project page, along with the associated code, can be accessed via the following https://xk-huang.github.io/segment-caption-anything/.

Post-training Quantization with Progressive Calibration and Activation Relaxing for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Diffusion models have achieved great success due to their remarkable generation ability. However, their high computational overhead is still a troublesome problem. Recent studies have leveraged post-training quantization (PTQ) to compress diffusion models. However, most of them only focus on unconditional models, leaving the quantization of widely used large pretrained text-to-image models, e.g., Stable Diffusion, largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose a novel post-training quantization method PCR (Progressive Calibration and Relaxing) for text-to-image diffusion models, which consists of a progressive calibration strategy that considers the accumulated quantization error across timesteps, and an activation relaxing strategy that improves the performance with negligible cost. Additionally, we demonstrate the previous metrics for text-to-image diffusion model quantization are not accurate due to the distribution gap. To tackle the problem, we propose a novel QDiffBench benchmark, which utilizes data in the same domain for more accurate evaluation. Besides, QDiffBench also considers the generalization performance of the quantized model outside the calibration dataset. Extensive experiments on Stable Diffusion and Stable Diffusion XL demonstrate the superiority of our method and benchmark. Moreover, we are the first to achieve quantization for Stable Diffusion XL while maintaining the performance.

Lightweight Diffusion Models with Distillation-Based Block Neural Architecture Search

Diffusion models have recently shown remarkable generation ability, achieving state-of-the-art performance in many tasks. However, the high computational cost is still a troubling problem for diffusion models. To tackle this problem, we propose to automatically remove the structural redundancy in diffusion models with our proposed Diffusion Distillation-based Block-wise Neural Architecture Search (DiffNAS). Specifically, given a larger pretrained teacher, we leverage DiffNAS to search for the smallest architecture which can achieve on-par or even better performance than the teacher. Considering current diffusion models are based on UNet which naturally has a block-wise structure, we perform neural architecture search independently in each block, which largely reduces the search space. Different from previous block-wise NAS methods, DiffNAS contains a block-wise local search strategy and a retraining strategy with a joint dynamic loss. Concretely, during the search process, we block-wisely select the best subnet to avoid the unfairness brought by the global search strategy used in previous works. When retraining the searched architecture, we adopt a dynamic joint loss to maintain the consistency between supernet training and subnet retraining, which also provides informative objectives for each block and shortens the paths of gradient propagation. We demonstrate this joint loss can effectively improve model performance. We also prove the necessity of the dynamic adjustment of this loss. The experiments show that our method can achieve significant computational reduction, especially on latent diffusion models with about 50\% MACs and Parameter reduction.

MCUFormer: Deploying Vision Tranformers on Microcontrollers with Limited Memory

Due to the high price and heavy energy consumption of GPUs, deploying deep models on IoT devices such as microcontrollers makes significant contributions for ecological AI. Conventional methods successfully enable convolutional neural network inference of high resolution images on microcontrollers, while the framework for vision transformers that achieve the state-of-the-art performance in many vision applications still remains unexplored. In this paper, we propose a hardware-algorithm co-optimizations method called MCUFormer to deploy vision transformers on microcontrollers with extremely limited memory, where we jointly design transformer architecture and construct the inference operator library to fit the memory resource constraint. More specifically, we generalize the one-shot network architecture search (NAS) to discover the optimal architecture with highest task performance given the memory budget from the microcontrollers, where we enlarge the existing search space of vision transformers by considering the low-rank decomposition dimensions and patch resolution for memory reduction. For the construction of the inference operator library of vision transformers, we schedule the memory buffer during inference through operator integration, patch embedding decomposition, and token overwriting, allowing the memory buffer to be fully utilized to adapt to the forward pass of the vision transformer. Experimental results demonstrate that our MCUFormer achieves 73.62\% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet for image classification with 320KB memory on STM32F746 microcontroller. Code is available at https://github.com/liangyn22/MCUFormer.

Skip-Plan: Procedure Planning in Instructional Videos via Condensed Action Space Learning

In this paper, we propose Skip-Plan, a condensed action space learning method for procedure planning in instructional videos. Current procedure planning methods all stick to the state-action pair prediction at every timestep and generate actions adjacently. Although it coincides with human intuition, such a methodology consistently struggles with high-dimensional state supervision and error accumulation on action sequences. In this work, we abstract the procedure planning problem as a mathematical chain model. By skipping uncertain nodes and edges in action chains, we transfer long and complex sequence functions into short but reliable ones in two ways. First, we skip all the intermediate state supervision and only focus on action predictions. Second, we decompose relatively long chains into multiple short sub-chains by skipping unreliable intermediate actions. By this means, our model explores all sorts of reliable sub-relations within an action sequence in the condensed action space. Extensive experiments show Skip-Plan achieves state-of-the-art performance on the CrossTask and COIN benchmarks for procedure planning.

Tem-adapter: Adapting Image-Text Pretraining for Video Question Answer

Video-language pre-trained models have shown remarkable success in guiding video question-answering (VideoQA) tasks. However, due to the length of video sequences, training large-scale video-based models incurs considerably higher costs than training image-based ones. This motivates us to leverage the knowledge from image-based pretraining, despite the obvious gaps between image and video domains. To bridge these gaps, in this paper, we propose Tem-Adapter, which enables the learning of temporal dynamics and complex semantics by a visual Temporal Aligner and a textual Semantic Aligner. Unlike conventional pretrained knowledge adaptation methods that only concentrate on the downstream task objective, the Temporal Aligner introduces an extra language-guided autoregressive task aimed at facilitating the learning of temporal dependencies, with the objective of predicting future states based on historical clues and language guidance that describes event progression. Besides, to reduce the semantic gap and adapt the textual representation for better event description, we introduce a Semantic Aligner that first designs a template to fuse question and answer pairs as event descriptions and then learns a Transformer decoder with the whole video sequence as guidance for refinement. We evaluate Tem-Adapter and different pre-train transferring methods on two VideoQA benchmarks, and the significant performance improvement demonstrates the effectiveness of our method.

Ada-DQA: Adaptive Diverse Quality-aware Feature Acquisition for Video Quality Assessment

Video quality assessment (VQA) has attracted growing attention in recent years. While the great expense of annotating large-scale VQA datasets has become the main obstacle for current deep-learning methods. To surmount the constraint of insufficient training data, in this paper, we first consider the complete range of video distribution diversity (\ie content, distortion, motion) and employ diverse pretrained models (\eg architecture, pretext task, pre-training dataset) to benefit quality representation. An Adaptive Diverse Quality-aware feature Acquisition (Ada-DQA) framework is proposed to capture desired quality-related features generated by these frozen pretrained models. By leveraging the Quality-aware Acquisition Module (QAM), the framework is able to extract more essential and relevant features to represent quality. Finally, the learned quality representation is utilized as supplementary supervisory information, along with the supervision of the labeled quality score, to guide the training of a relatively lightweight VQA model in a knowledge distillation manner, which largely reduces the computational cost during inference. Experimental results on three mainstream no-reference VQA benchmarks clearly show the superior performance of Ada-DQA in comparison with current state-of-the-art approaches without using extra training data of VQA.

Language-free Compositional Action Generation via Decoupling Refinement

Composing simple elements into complex concepts is crucial yet challenging, especially for 3D action generation. Existing methods largely rely on extensive neural language annotations to discern composable latent semantics, a process that is often costly and labor-intensive. In this study, we introduce a novel framework to generate compositional actions without reliance on language auxiliaries. Our approach consists of three main components: Action Coupling, Conditional Action Generation, and Decoupling Refinement. Action Coupling utilizes an energy model to extract the attention masks of each sub-action, subsequently integrating two actions using these attentions to generate pseudo-training examples. Then, we employ a conditional generative model, CVAE, to learn a latent space, facilitating the diverse generation. Finally, we propose Decoupling Refinement, which leverages a self-supervised pre-trained model MAE to ensure semantic consistency between the sub-actions and compositional actions. This refinement process involves rendering generated 3D actions into 2D space, decoupling these images into two sub-segments, using the MAE model to restore the complete image from sub-segments, and constraining the recovered images to match images rendered from raw sub-actions. Due to the lack of existing datasets containing both sub-actions and compositional actions, we created two new datasets, named HumanAct-C and UESTC-C, and present a corresponding evaluation metric. Both qualitative and quantitative assessments are conducted to show our efficacy.