MULAN: A Multi Layer Annotated Dataset for Controllable Text-to-Image Generation

Text-to-image generation has achieved astonishing results, yet precise spatial controllability and prompt fidelity remain highly challenging. This limitation is typically addressed through cumbersome prompt engineering, scene layout conditioning, or image editing techniques which often require hand drawn masks. Nonetheless, pre-existing works struggle to take advantage of the natural instance-level compositionality of scenes due to the typically flat nature of rasterized RGB output images. Towards adressing this challenge, we introduce MuLAn: a novel dataset comprising over 44K MUlti-Layer ANnotations of RGB images as multilayer, instance-wise RGBA decompositions, and over 100K instance images. To build MuLAn, we developed a training free pipeline which decomposes a monocular RGB image into a stack of RGBA layers comprising of background and isolated instances. We achieve this through the use of pretrained general-purpose models, and by developing three modules: image decomposition for instance discovery and extraction, instance completion to reconstruct occluded areas, and image re-assembly. We use our pipeline to create MuLAn-COCO and MuLAn-LAION datasets, which contain a variety of image decompositions in terms of style, composition and complexity. With MuLAn, we provide the first photorealistic resource providing instance decomposition and occlusion information for high quality images, opening up new avenues for text-to-image generative AI research. With this, we aim to encourage the development of novel generation and editing technology, in particular layer-wise solutions. MuLAn data resources are available at https://MuLAn-dataset.github.io/.

Safety Fine-Tuning at (Almost) No Cost: A Baseline for Vision Large Language Models

Current vision large language models (VLLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities yet are prone to generate harmful content and are vulnerable to even the simplest jailbreaking attacks. Our initial analysis finds that this is due to the presence of harmful data during vision-language instruction fine-tuning, and that VLLM fine-tuning can cause forgetting of safety alignment previously learned by the underpinning LLM. To address this issue, we first curate a vision-language safe instruction-following dataset VLGuard covering various harmful categories. Our experiments demonstrate that integrating this dataset into standard vision-language fine-tuning or utilizing it for post-hoc fine-tuning effectively safety aligns VLLMs. This alignment is achieved with minimal impact on, or even enhancement of, the models' helpfulness. The versatility of our safety fine-tuning dataset makes it a valuable resource for safety-testing existing VLLMs, training new models or safeguarding pre-trained VLLMs. Empirical results demonstrate that fine-tuned VLLMs effectively reject unsafe instructions and substantially reduce the success rates of several black-box adversarial attacks, which approach zero in many cases. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/ys-zong/VLGuard.

SERF: Fine-Grained Interactive 3D Segmentation and Editing with Radiance Fields

Although significant progress has been made in the field of 2D-based interactive editing, fine-grained 3D-based interactive editing remains relatively unexplored. This limitation can be attributed to two main challenges: the lack of an efficient 3D representation robust to different modifications and the absence of an effective 3D interactive segmentation method. In this paper, we introduce a novel fine-grained interactive 3D segmentation and editing algorithm with radiance fields, which we refer to as SERF. Our method entails creating a neural mesh representation by integrating multi-view algorithms with pre-trained 2D models. Building upon this representation, we introduce a novel surface rendering technique that preserves local information and is robust to deformation. Moreover, this representation forms the basis for achieving accurate and interactive 3D segmentation without requiring 3D supervision. Harnessing this representation facilitates a range of interactive 3D editing operations, encompassing tasks such as interactive geometry editing and texture painting. Extensive experiments and visualization examples of editing on both real and synthetic data demonstrate the superiority of our method on representation quality and editing ability.

Optimisation-Based Multi-Modal Semantic Image Editing

Image editing affords increased control over the aesthetics and content of generated images. Pre-existing works focus predominantly on text-based instructions to achieve desired image modifications, which limit edit precision and accuracy. In this work, we propose an inference-time editing optimisation, designed to extend beyond textual edits to accommodate multiple editing instruction types (e.g. spatial layout-based; pose, scribbles, edge maps). We propose to disentangle the editing task into two competing subtasks: successful local image modifications and global content consistency preservation, where subtasks are guided through two dedicated loss functions. By allowing to adjust the influence of each loss function, we build a flexible editing solution that can be adjusted to user preferences. We evaluate our method using text, pose and scribble edit conditions, and highlight our ability to achieve complex edits, through both qualitative and quantitative experiments.

ChiroDiff: Modelling chirographic data with Diffusion Models

Generative modelling over continuous-time geometric constructs, a.k.a such as handwriting, sketches, drawings etc., have been accomplished through autoregressive distributions. Such strictly-ordered discrete factorization however falls short of capturing key properties of chirographic data -- it fails to build holistic understanding of the temporal concept due to one-way visibility (causality). Consequently, temporal data has been modelled as discrete token sequences of fixed sampling rate instead of capturing the true underlying concept. In this paper, we introduce a powerful model-class namely "Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models" or DDPMs for chirographic data that specifically addresses these flaws. Our model named "ChiroDiff", being non-autoregressive, learns to capture holistic concepts and therefore remains resilient to higher temporal sampling rate up to a good extent. Moreover, we show that many important downstream utilities (e.g. conditional sampling, creative mixing) can be flexibly implemented using ChiroDiff. We further show some unique use-cases like stochastic vectorization, de-noising/healing, abstraction are also possible with this model-class. We perform quantitative and qualitative evaluation of our framework on relevant datasets and found it to be better or on par with competing approaches.

Learning to Name Classes for Vision and Language Models

Large scale vision and language models can achieve impressive zero-shot recognition performance by mapping class specific text queries to image content. Two distinct challenges that remain however, are high sensitivity to the choice of handcrafted class names that define queries, and the difficulty of adaptation to new, smaller datasets. Towards addressing these problems, we propose to leverage available data to learn, for each class, an optimal word embedding as a function of the visual content. By learning new word embeddings on an otherwise frozen model, we are able to retain zero-shot capabilities for new classes, easily adapt models to new datasets, and adjust potentially erroneous, non-descriptive or ambiguous class names. We show that our solution can easily be integrated in image classification and object detection pipelines, yields significant performance gains in multiple scenarios and provides insights into model biases and labelling errors.

Region Proposal Network Pre-Training Helps Label-Efficient Object Detection

Self-supervised pre-training, based on the pretext task of instance discrimination, has fueled the recent advance in label-efficient object detection. However, existing studies focus on pre-training only a feature extractor network to learn transferable representations for downstream detection tasks. This leads to the necessity of training multiple detection-specific modules from scratch in the fine-tuning phase. We argue that the region proposal network (RPN), a common detection-specific module, can additionally be pre-trained towards reducing the localization error of multi-stage detectors. In this work, we propose a simple pretext task that provides an effective pre-training for the RPN, towards efficiently improving downstream object detection performance. We evaluate the efficacy of our approach on benchmark object detection tasks and additional downstream tasks, including instance segmentation and few-shot detection. In comparison with multi-stage detectors without RPN pre-training, our approach is able to consistently improve downstream task performance, with largest gains found in label-scarce settings.

ZooD: Exploiting Model Zoo for Out-of-Distribution Generalization

Recent advances on large-scale pre-training have shown great potentials of leveraging a large set of Pre-Trained Models (PTMs) for improving Out-of-Distribution (OoD) generalization, for which the goal is to perform well on possible unseen domains after fine-tuning on multiple training domains. However, maximally exploiting a zoo of PTMs is challenging since fine-tuning all possible combinations of PTMs is computationally prohibitive while accurate selection of PTMs requires tackling the possible data distribution shift for OoD tasks. In this work, we propose ZooD, a paradigm for PTMs ranking and ensemble with feature selection. Our proposed metric ranks PTMs by quantifying inter-class discriminability and inter-domain stability of the features extracted by the PTMs in a leave-one-domain-out cross-validation manner. The top-K ranked models are then aggregated for the target OoD task. To avoid accumulating noise induced by model ensemble, we propose an efficient variational EM algorithm to select informative features. We evaluate our paradigm on a diverse model zoo consisting of 35 models for various OoD tasks and demonstrate: (i) model ranking is better correlated with fine-tuning ranking than previous methods and up to 9859x faster than brute-force fine-tuning; (ii) OoD generalization after model ensemble with feature selection outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and the accuracy on most challenging task DomainNet is improved from 46.5\% to 50.6\%. Furthermore, we provide the fine-tuning results of 35 PTMs on 7 OoD datasets, hoping to help the research of model zoo and OoD generalization. Code will be available at https://gitee.com/mindspore/models/tree/master/research/cv/zood.

MEDFAIR: Benchmarking Fairness for Medical Imaging

A multitude of work has shown that machine learning-based medical diagnosis systems can be biased against certain subgroups of people. This has motivated a growing number of bias mitigation algorithms that aim to address fairness issues in machine learning. However, it is difficult to compare their effectiveness in medical imaging for two reasons. First, there is little consensus on the criteria to assess fairness. Second, existing bias mitigation algorithms are developed under different settings, e.g., datasets, model selection strategies, backbones, and fairness metrics, making a direct comparison and evaluation based on existing results impossible. In this work, we introduce MEDFAIR, a framework to benchmark the fairness of machine learning models for medical imaging. MEDFAIR covers eleven algorithms from various categories, nine datasets from different imaging modalities, and three model selection criteria. Through extensive experiments, we find that the under-studied issue of model selection criterion can have a significant impact on fairness outcomes; while in contrast, state-of-the-art bias mitigation algorithms do not significantly improve fairness outcomes over empirical risk minimization (ERM) in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings. We evaluate fairness from various perspectives and make recommendations for different medical application scenarios that require different ethical principles. Our framework provides a reproducible and easy-to-use entry point for the development and evaluation of future bias mitigation algorithms in deep learning. Code is available at https://github.com/ys-zong/MEDFAIR.

Towards 3D VR-Sketch to 3D Shape Retrieval

Growing free online 3D shapes collections dictated research on 3D retrieval. Active debate has however been had on (i) what the best input modality is to trigger retrieval, and (ii) the ultimate usage scenario for such retrieval. In this paper, we offer a different perspective towards answering these questions -- we study the use of 3D sketches as an input modality and advocate a VR-scenario where retrieval is conducted. Thus, the ultimate vision is that users can freely retrieve a 3D model by air-doodling in a VR environment. As a first stab at this new 3D VR-sketch to 3D shape retrieval problem, we make four contributions. First, we code a VR utility to collect 3D VR-sketches and conduct retrieval. Second, we collect the first set of $167$ 3D VR-sketches on two shape categories from ModelNet. Third, we propose a novel approach to generate a synthetic dataset of human-like 3D sketches of different abstract levels to train deep networks. At last, we compare the common multi-view and volumetric approaches: We show that, in contrast to 3D shape to 3D shape retrieval, volumetric point-based approaches exhibit superior performance on 3D sketch to 3D shape retrieval due to the sparse and abstract nature of 3D VR-sketches. We believe these contributions will collectively serve as enablers for future attempts at this problem. The VR interface, code and datasets are available at https://tinyurl.com/3DSketch3DV.