T2IW: Joint Text to Image & Watermark Generation

Recent developments in text-conditioned image generative models have revolutionized the production of realistic results. Unfortunately, this has also led to an increase in privacy violations and the spread of false information, which requires the need for traceability, privacy protection, and other security measures. However, existing text-to-image paradigms lack the technical capabilities to link traceable messages with image generation. In this study, we introduce a novel task for the joint generation of text to image and watermark (T2IW). This T2IW scheme ensures minimal damage to image quality when generating a compound image by forcing the semantic feature and the watermark signal to be compatible in pixels. Additionally, by utilizing principles from Shannon information theory and non-cooperative game theory, we are able to separate the revealed image and the revealed watermark from the compound image. Furthermore, we strengthen the watermark robustness of our approach by subjecting the compound image to various post-processing attacks, with minimal pixel distortion observed in the revealed watermark. Extensive experiments have demonstrated remarkable achievements in image quality, watermark invisibility, and watermark robustness, supported by our proposed set of evaluation metrics.

A Circuit Domain Generalization Framework for Efficient Logic Synthesis in Chip Design

Logic Synthesis (LS) plays a vital role in chip design -- a cornerstone of the semiconductor industry. A key task in LS is to transform circuits -- modeled by directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) -- into simplified circuits with equivalent functionalities. To tackle this task, many LS operators apply transformations to subgraphs -- rooted at each node on an input DAG -- sequentially. However, we found that a large number of transformations are ineffective, which makes applying these operators highly time-consuming. In particular, we notice that the runtime of the Resub and Mfs2 operators often dominates the overall runtime of LS optimization processes. To address this challenge, we propose a novel data-driven LS operator paradigm, namely PruneX, to reduce ineffective transformations. The major challenge of developing PruneX is to learn models that well generalize to unseen circuits, i.e., the out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization problem. Thus, the major technical contribution of PruneX is the novel circuit domain generalization framework, which learns domain-invariant representations based on the transformation-invariant domain-knowledge. To the best of our knowledge, PruneX is the first approach to tackle the OOD problem in LS operators. We integrate PruneX with the aforementioned Resub and Mfs2 operators. Experiments demonstrate that PruneX significantly improves their efficiency while keeping comparable optimization performance on industrial and very large-scale circuits, achieving up to $3.1\times$ faster runtime.

Balanced Classification: A Unified Framework for Long-Tailed Object Detection

Conventional detectors suffer from performance degradation when dealing with long-tailed data due to a classification bias towards the majority head categories. In this paper, we contend that the learning bias originates from two factors: 1) the unequal competition arising from the imbalanced distribution of foreground categories, and 2) the lack of sample diversity in tail categories. To tackle these issues, we introduce a unified framework called BAlanced CLassification (BACL), which enables adaptive rectification of inequalities caused by disparities in category distribution and dynamic intensification of sample diversities in a synchronized manner. Specifically, a novel foreground classification balance loss (FCBL) is developed to ameliorate the domination of head categories and shift attention to difficult-to-differentiate categories by introducing pairwise class-aware margins and auto-adjusted weight terms, respectively. This loss prevents the over-suppression of tail categories in the context of unequal competition. Moreover, we propose a dynamic feature hallucination module (FHM), which enhances the representation of tail categories in the feature space by synthesizing hallucinated samples to introduce additional data variances. In this divide-and-conquer approach, BACL sets a new state-of-the-art on the challenging LVIS benchmark with a decoupled training pipeline, surpassing vanilla Faster R-CNN with ResNet-50-FPN by 5.8% AP and 16.1% AP for overall and tail categories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BACL consistently achieves performance improvements across various datasets with different backbones and architectures. Code and models are available at https://github.com/Tianhao-Qi/BACL.

MomentDiff: Generative Video Moment Retrieval from Random to Real

Video moment retrieval pursues an efficient and generalized solution to identify the specific temporal segments within an untrimmed video that correspond to a given language description. To achieve this goal, we provide a generative diffusion-based framework called MomentDiff, which simulates a typical human retrieval process from random browsing to gradual localization. Specifically, we first diffuse the real span to random noise, and learn to denoise the random noise to the original span with the guidance of similarity between text and video. This allows the model to learn a mapping from arbitrary random locations to real moments, enabling the ability to locate segments from random initialization. Once trained, MomentDiff could sample random temporal segments as initial guesses and iteratively refine them to generate an accurate temporal boundary. Different from discriminative works (e.g., based on learnable proposals or queries), MomentDiff with random initialized spans could resist the temporal location biases from datasets. To evaluate the influence of the temporal location biases, we propose two anti-bias datasets with location distribution shifts, named Charades-STA-Len and Charades-STA-Mom. The experimental results demonstrate that our efficient framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three public benchmarks, and exhibits better generalization and robustness on the proposed anti-bias datasets. The code, model, and anti-bias evaluation datasets are available at https://github.com/IMCCretrieval/MomentDiff.

DreamIdentity: Improved Editability for Efficient Face-identity Preserved Image Generation

While large-scale pre-trained text-to-image models can synthesize diverse and high-quality human-centric images, an intractable problem is how to preserve the face identity for conditioned face images. Existing methods either require time-consuming optimization for each face-identity or learning an efficient encoder at the cost of harming the editability of models. In this work, we present an optimization-free method for each face identity, meanwhile keeping the editability for text-to-image models. Specifically, we propose a novel face-identity encoder to learn an accurate representation of human faces, which applies multi-scale face features followed by a multi-embedding projector to directly generate the pseudo words in the text embedding space. Besides, we propose self-augmented editability learning to enhance the editability of models, which is achieved by constructing paired generated face and edited face images using celebrity names, aiming at transferring mature ability of off-the-shelf text-to-image models in celebrity faces to unseen faces. Extensive experiments show that our methods can generate identity-preserved images under different scenes at a much faster speed.

Proposal-Based Multiple Instance Learning for Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Localization

Weakly-supervised temporal action localization aims to localize and recognize actions in untrimmed videos with only video-level category labels during training. Without instance-level annotations, most existing methods follow the Segment-based Multiple Instance Learning (S-MIL) framework, where the predictions of segments are supervised by the labels of videos. However, the objective for acquiring segment-level scores during training is not consistent with the target for acquiring proposal-level scores during testing, leading to suboptimal results. To deal with this problem, we propose a novel Proposal-based Multiple Instance Learning (P-MIL) framework that directly classifies the candidate proposals in both the training and testing stages, which includes three key designs: 1) a surrounding contrastive feature extraction module to suppress the discriminative short proposals by considering the surrounding contrastive information, 2) a proposal completeness evaluation module to inhibit the low-quality proposals with the guidance of the completeness pseudo labels, and 3) an instance-level rank consistency loss to achieve robust detection by leveraging the complementarity of RGB and FLOW modalities. Extensive experimental results on two challenging benchmarks including THUMOS14 and ActivityNet demonstrate the superior performance of our method.

ExpertPrompting: Instructing Large Language Models to be Distinguished Experts

The answering quality of an aligned large language model (LLM) can be drastically improved if treated with proper crafting of prompts. In this paper, we propose ExpertPrompting to elicit the potential of LLMs to answer as distinguished experts. We first utilize In-Context Learning to automatically synthesize detailed and customized descriptions of the expert identity for each specific instruction, and then ask LLMs to provide answer conditioned on such agent background. Based on this augmented prompting strategy, we produce a new set of instruction-following data using GPT-3.5, and train a competitive open-source chat assistant called ExpertLLaMA. We employ GPT4-based evaluation to show that 1) the expert data is of significantly higher quality than vanilla answers, and 2) ExpertLLaMA outperforms existing open-source opponents and achieves 96\% of the original ChatGPT's capability. All data and the ExpertLLaMA model will be made publicly available at \url{https://github.com/OFA-Sys/ExpertLLaMA}.

Not All Image Regions Matter: Masked Vector Quantization for Autoregressive Image Generation

Existing autoregressive models follow the two-stage generation paradigm that first learns a codebook in the latent space for image reconstruction and then completes the image generation autoregressively based on the learned codebook. However, existing codebook learning simply models all local region information of images without distinguishing their different perceptual importance, which brings redundancy in the learned codebook that not only limits the next stage's autoregressive model's ability to model important structure but also results in high training cost and slow generation speed. In this study, we borrow the idea of importance perception from classical image coding theory and propose a novel two-stage framework, which consists of Masked Quantization VAE (MQ-VAE) and Stackformer, to relieve the model from modeling redundancy. Specifically, MQ-VAE incorporates an adaptive mask module for masking redundant region features before quantization and an adaptive de-mask module for recovering the original grid image feature map to faithfully reconstruct the original images after quantization. Then, Stackformer learns to predict the combination of the next code and its position in the feature map. Comprehensive experiments on various image generation validate our effectiveness and efficiency. Code will be released at https://github.com/CrossmodalGroup/MaskedVectorQuantization.

Towards Accurate Image Coding: Improved Autoregressive Image Generation with Dynamic Vector Quantization

Existing vector quantization (VQ) based autoregressive models follow a two-stage generation paradigm that first learns a codebook to encode images as discrete codes, and then completes generation based on the learned codebook. However, they encode fixed-size image regions into fixed-length codes and ignore their naturally different information densities, which results in insufficiency in important regions and redundancy in unimportant ones, and finally degrades the generation quality and speed. Moreover, the fixed-length coding leads to an unnatural raster-scan autoregressive generation. To address the problem, we propose a novel two-stage framework: (1) Dynamic-Quantization VAE (DQ-VAE) which encodes image regions into variable-length codes based on their information densities for an accurate and compact code representation. (2) DQ-Transformer which thereby generates images autoregressively from coarse-grained (smooth regions with fewer codes) to fine-grained (details regions with more codes) by modeling the position and content of codes in each granularity alternately, through a novel stacked-transformer architecture and shared-content, non-shared position input layers designs. Comprehensive experiments on various generation tasks validate our superiorities in both effectiveness and efficiency. Code will be released at https://github.com/CrossmodalGroup/DynamicVectorQuantization.

Linguistic More: Taking a Further Step toward Efficient and Accurate Scene Text Recognition

Vision model have gained increasing attention due to their simplicity and efficiency in Scene Text Recognition (STR) task. However, due to lacking the perception of linguistic knowledge and information, recent vision models suffer from two problems: (1) the pure vision-based query results in attention drift, which usually causes poor recognition and is summarized as linguistic insensitive drift (LID) problem in this paper. (2) the visual feature is suboptimal for the recognition in some vision-missing cases (e.g. occlusion, etc.). To address these issues, we propose a $\textbf{L}$inguistic $\textbf{P}$erception $\textbf{V}$ision model (LPV), which explores the linguistic capability of vision model for accurate text recognition. To alleviate the LID problem, we introduce a Cascade Position Attention (CPA) mechanism that obtains high-quality and accurate attention maps through step-wise optimization and linguistic information mining. Furthermore, a Global Linguistic Reconstruction Module (GLRM) is proposed to improve the representation of visual features by perceiving the linguistic information in the visual space, which gradually converts visual features into semantically rich ones during the cascade process. Different from previous methods, our method obtains SOTA results while keeping low complexity (92.4% accuracy with only 8.11M parameters). Code is available at https://github.com/CyrilSterling/LPV.