Image Captioning via Dynamic Path Customization

This paper explores a novel dynamic network for vision and language tasks, where the inferring structure is customized on the fly for different inputs. Most previous state-of-the-art approaches are static and hand-crafted networks, which not only heavily rely on expert knowledge, but also ignore the semantic diversity of input samples, therefore resulting in suboptimal performance. To address these issues, we propose a novel Dynamic Transformer Network (DTNet) for image captioning, which dynamically assigns customized paths to different samples, leading to discriminative yet accurate captions. Specifically, to build a rich routing space and improve routing efficiency, we introduce five types of basic cells and group them into two separate routing spaces according to their operating domains, i.e., spatial and channel. Then, we design a Spatial-Channel Joint Router (SCJR), which endows the model with the capability of path customization based on both spatial and channel information of the input sample. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed DTNet, we conduct extensive experiments on the MS-COCO dataset and achieve new state-of-the-art performance on both the Karpathy split and the online test server.

Deep Instruction Tuning for Segment Anything Model

Segment Anything Model (SAM) exhibits powerful yet versatile capabilities on (un) conditional image segmentation tasks recently. Although SAM can support various segmentation prompts, we note that, compared to point- and box-guided segmentation, it performs much worse on text-instructed tasks. We argue that deep text instruction tuning is key to mitigate such shortcoming caused by the shallow fusion scheme in its default light-weight mask decoder. In this paper, two \emph{deep instruction tuning} (DIT) methods are proposed, one is end-to-end and the other is layer-wise. With these tuning methods, we can regard the image encoder of SAM as a stand-alone vision-language learner in contrast to building another deep fusion branch. Extensive experiments on three highly competitive benchmark datasets of referring image segmentation show that a simple end-to-end DIT improves SAM by a large margin, with layer-wise DIT further boosts the performance to state-of-the-art. Our code is anonymously released at: https://github.com/wysnzzzz/DIT.

Not All Attention is Needed: Parameter and Computation Efficient Transfer Learning for Multi-modal Large Language Models

In this paper, we propose a novel parameter and computation efficient tuning method for Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), termed Efficient Attention Skipping (EAS). Concretely, we first reveal that multi-head attentions (MHAs), the main computational overhead of MLLMs, are often redundant to downstream tasks. Based on this observation, EAS evaluates the attention redundancy and skips the less important MHAs to speed up inference. Besides, we also propose a novel propagation-of-information adapter (PIA) to serve the attention skipping of EAS and keep parameter efficiency, which can be further re-parameterized into feed-forward networks (FFNs) for zero-extra latency. To validate EAS, we apply it to a recently proposed MLLM called LaVIN and a classic VL pre-trained model called METER, and conduct extensive experiments on a set of benchmarks. The experiments show that EAS not only retains high performance and parameter efficiency, but also greatly speeds up inference speed. For instance, LaVIN-EAS can obtain 89.98\% accuracy on ScineceQA while speeding up inference by 2.2 times to LaVIN

Fast Text-to-3D-Aware Face Generation and Manipulation via Direct Cross-modal Mapping and Geometric Regularization

Text-to-3D-aware face (T3D Face) generation and manipulation is an emerging research hot spot in machine learning, which still suffers from low efficiency and poor quality. In this paper, we propose an End-to-End Efficient and Effective network for fast and accurate T3D face generation and manipulation, termed $E^3$-FaceNet. Different from existing complex generation paradigms, $E^3$-FaceNet resorts to a direct mapping from text instructions to 3D-aware visual space. We introduce a novel Style Code Enhancer to enhance cross-modal semantic alignment, alongside an innovative Geometric Regularization objective to maintain consistency across multi-view generations. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that $E^3$-FaceNet can not only achieve picture-like 3D face generation and manipulation, but also improve inference speed by orders of magnitudes. For instance, compared with Latent3D, $E^3$-FaceNet speeds up the five-view generations by almost 470 times, while still exceeding in generation quality. Our code are released at https://github.com/Aria-Zhangjl/E3-FaceNet.

Feast Your Eyes: Mixture-of-Resolution Adaptation for Multimodal Large Language Models

Despite remarkable progress, existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are still inferior in granular visual recognition. Contrary to previous works, we study this problem from the perspective of image resolution, and reveal that a combination of low- and high-resolution visual features can effectively mitigate this shortcoming. Based on this observation, we propose a novel and efficient method for MLLMs, termed Mixture-of-Resolution Adaptation (MRA). In particular, MRA adopts two visual pathways for images with different resolutions, where high-resolution visual information is embedded into the low-resolution pathway via the novel mixture-of-resolution adapters (MR-Adapters). This design also greatly reduces the input sequence length of MLLMs. To validate MRA, we apply it to a recent MLLM called LLaVA, and term the new model LLaVA-HR. We conduct extensive experiments on 11 vision-language (VL) tasks, which show that LLaVA-HR outperforms existing MLLMs on 8 VL tasks, e.g., +9.4% on TextVQA. More importantly, both training and inference of LLaVA-HR remain efficient with MRA, e.g., 20 training hours and 3$\times$ inference speed than LLaVA-1.5. Source codes are released at: https://github.com/luogen1996/LLaVA-HR.

Towards Efficient Diffusion-Based Image Editing with Instant Attention Masks

Diffusion-based Image Editing (DIE) is an emerging research hot-spot, which often applies a semantic mask to control the target area for diffusion-based editing. However, most existing solutions obtain these masks via manual operations or off-line processing, greatly reducing their efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient image editing method for Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models, termed Instant Diffusion Editing(InstDiffEdit). In particular, InstDiffEdit aims to employ the cross-modal attention ability of existing diffusion models to achieve instant mask guidance during the diffusion steps. To reduce the noise of attention maps and realize the full automatics, we equip InstDiffEdit with a training-free refinement scheme to adaptively aggregate the attention distributions for the automatic yet accurate mask generation. Meanwhile, to supplement the existing evaluations of DIE, we propose a new benchmark called Editing-Mask to examine the mask accuracy and local editing ability of existing methods. To validate InstDiffEdit, we also conduct extensive experiments on ImageNet and Imagen, and compare it with a bunch of the SOTA methods. The experimental results show that InstDiffEdit not only outperforms the SOTA methods in both image quality and editing results, but also has a much faster inference speed, i.e., +5 to +6 times.

Towards Omni-supervised Referring Expression Segmentation

Referring Expression Segmentation (RES) is an emerging task in computer vision, which segments the target instances in images based on text descriptions. However, its development is plagued by the expensive segmentation labels. To address this issue, we propose a new learning task for RES called Omni-supervised Referring Expression Segmentation (Omni-RES), which aims to make full use of unlabeled, fully labeled and weakly labeled data, e.g., referring points or grounding boxes, for efficient RES training. To accomplish this task, we also propose a novel yet strong baseline method for Omni-RES based on the recently popular teacher-student learning, where where the weak labels are not directly transformed into supervision signals but used as a yardstick to select and refine high-quality pseudo-masks for teacher-student learning. To validate the proposed Omni-RES method, we apply it to a set of state-of-the-art RES models and conduct extensive experiments on a bunch of RES datasets. The experimental results yield the obvious merits of Omni-RES than the fully-supervised and semi-supervised training schemes. For instance, with only 10% fully labeled data, Omni-RES can help the base model achieve 100% fully supervised performance, and it also outperform the semi-supervised alternative by a large margin, e.g., +14.93% on RefCOCO and +14.95% on RefCOCO+, respectively. More importantly, Omni-RES also enable the use of large-scale vision-langauges like Visual Genome to facilitate low-cost RES training, and achieve new SOTA performance of RES, e.g., 80.66 on RefCOCO.

NICE: Improving Panoptic Narrative Detection and Segmentation with Cascading Collaborative Learning

Panoptic Narrative Detection (PND) and Segmentation (PNS) are two challenging tasks that involve identifying and locating multiple targets in an image according to a long narrative description. In this paper, we propose a unified and effective framework called NICE that can jointly learn these two panoptic narrative recognition tasks. Existing visual grounding tasks use a two-branch paradigm, but applying this directly to PND and PNS can result in prediction conflict due to their intrinsic many-to-many alignment property. To address this, we introduce two cascading modules based on the barycenter of the mask, which are Coordinate Guided Aggregation (CGA) and Barycenter Driven Localization (BDL), responsible for segmentation and detection, respectively. By linking PNS and PND in series with the barycenter of segmentation as the anchor, our approach naturally aligns the two tasks and allows them to complement each other for improved performance. Specifically, CGA provides the barycenter as a reference for detection, reducing BDL's reliance on a large number of candidate boxes. BDL leverages its excellent properties to distinguish different instances, which improves the performance of CGA for segmentation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NICE surpasses all existing methods by a large margin, achieving 4.1% for PND and 2.9% for PNS over the state-of-the-art. These results validate the effectiveness of our proposed collaborative learning strategy. The project of this work is made publicly available at https://github.com/Mr-Neko/NICE.

Parameter and Computation Efficient Transfer Learning for Vision-Language Pre-trained Models

With ever increasing parameters and computation, vision-language pre-trained (VLP) models exhibit prohibitive expenditure in downstream task adaption. Recent endeavors mainly focus on parameter efficient transfer learning (PETL) for VLP models by only updating a small number of parameters. However, excessive computational overhead still plagues the application of VLPs. In this paper, we aim at parameter and computation efficient transfer learning (PCETL) for VLP models. In particular, PCETL not only needs to limit the number of trainable parameters in VLP models, but also to reduce the computational redundancy during inference, thus enabling a more efficient transfer. To approach this target, we propose a novel dynamic architecture skipping (DAS) approach towards effective PCETL. Instead of directly optimizing the intrinsic architectures of VLP models, DAS first observes the significances of their modules to downstream tasks via a reinforcement learning (RL) based process, and then skips the redundant ones with lightweight networks, i.e., adapters, according to the obtained rewards. In this case, the VLP model can well maintain the scale of trainable parameters while speeding up its inference on downstream tasks. To validate DAS, we apply it to two representative VLP models, namely ViLT and METER, and conduct extensive experiments on a bunch of VL tasks. The experimental results not only show the great advantages of DAS in reducing computational complexity, e.g. -11.97% FLOPs of METER on VQA2.0, but also confirm its competitiveness against existing PETL methods in terms of parameter scale and performance. Our source code is given in our appendix.

M3PS: End-to-End Multi-Grained Multi-Modal Attribute-Aware Product Summarization in E-commerce

Given the long textual product information and the product image, Multi-Modal Product Summarization (MMPS) aims to attract customers' interest and increase their desire to purchase by highlighting product characteristics with a short textual summary. Existing MMPS methods have achieved promising performance. Nevertheless, there still exist several problems: 1) lack end-to-end product summarization, 2) lack multi-grained multi-modal modeling, and 3) lack multi-modal attribute modeling. To address these issues, we propose an end-to-end multi-grained multi-modal attribute-aware product summarization method (M3PS) for generating high-quality product summaries in e-commerce. M3PS jointly models product attributes and generates product summaries. Meanwhile, we design several multi-grained multi-modal tasks to better guide the multi-modal learning of M3PS. Furthermore, we model product attributes based on both text and image modalities so that multi-modal product characteristics can be manifested in the generated summaries. Extensive experiments on a real large-scale Chinese e-commence dataset demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art product summarization methods w.r.t. several summarization metrics.