SDVPT: Semantic-Driven Visual Prompt Tuning for Open-World Object Counting

Open-world object counting leverages the robust text-image alignment of pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) to enable counting of arbitrary categories in images specified by textual queries. However, widely adopted naive fine-tuning strategies concentrate exclusively on text-image consistency for categories contained in training, which leads to limited generalizability for unseen categories. In this work, we propose a plug-and-play Semantic-Driven Visual Prompt Tuning framework (SDVPT) that transfers knowledge from the training set to unseen categories with minimal overhead in parameters and inference time. First, we introduce a two-stage visual prompt learning strategy composed of Category-Specific Prompt Initialization (CSPI) and Topology-Guided Prompt Refinement (TGPR). The CSPI generates category-specific visual prompts, and then TGPR distills latent structural patterns from the VLM's text encoder to refine these prompts. During inference, we dynamically synthesize the visual prompts for unseen categories based on the semantic correlation between unseen and training categories, facilitating robust text-image alignment for unseen categories. Extensive experiments integrating SDVPT with all available open-world object counting models demonstrate its effectiveness and adaptability across three widely used datasets: FSC-147, CARPK, and PUCPR+.

ProgRoCC: A Progressive Approach to Rough Crowd Counting

As the number of individuals in a crowd grows, enumeration-based techniques become increasingly infeasible and their estimates increasingly unreliable. We propose instead an estimation-based version of the problem: we label Rough Crowd Counting that delivers better accuracy on the basis of training data that is easier to acquire. Rough crowd counting requires only rough annotations of the number of targets in an image, instead of the more traditional, and far more expensive, per-target annotations. We propose an approach to the rough crowd counting problem based on CLIP, termed ProgRoCC. Specifically, we introduce a progressive estimation learning strategy that determines the object count through a coarse-to-fine approach. This approach delivers answers quickly, outperforms the state-of-the-art in semi- and weakly-supervised crowd counting. In addition, we design a vision-language matching adapter that optimizes key-value pairs by mining effective matches of two modalities to refine the visual features, thereby improving the final performance. Extensive experimental results on three widely adopted crowd counting datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

The Devil is in the Distributions: Explicit Modeling of Scene Content is Key in Zero-Shot Video Captioning

Zero-shot video captioning requires that a model generate high-quality captions without human-annotated video-text pairs for training. State-of-the-art approaches to the problem leverage CLIP to extract visual-relevant textual prompts to guide language models in generating captions. These methods tend to focus on one key aspect of the scene and build a caption that ignores the rest of the visual input. To address this issue, and generate more accurate and complete captions, we propose a novel progressive multi-granularity textual prompting strategy for zero-shot video captioning. Our approach constructs three distinct memory banks, encompassing noun phrases, scene graphs of noun phrases, and entire sentences. Moreover, we introduce a category-aware retrieval mechanism that models the distribution of natural language surrounding the specific topics in question. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with 5.7%, 16.2%, and 3.4% improvements in terms of the main metric CIDEr on MSR-VTT, MSVD, and VATEX benchmarks compared to existing state-of-the-art.

Visual and Semantic Prompt Collaboration for Generalized Zero-Shot Learning

Generalized zero-shot learning aims to recognize both seen and unseen classes with the help of semantic information that is shared among different classes. It inevitably requires consistent visual-semantic alignment. Existing approaches fine-tune the visual backbone by seen-class data to obtain semantic-related visual features, which may cause overfitting on seen classes with a limited number of training images. This paper proposes a novel visual and semantic prompt collaboration framework, which utilizes prompt tuning techniques for efficient feature adaptation. Specifically, we design a visual prompt to integrate the visual information for discriminative feature learning and a semantic prompt to integrate the semantic formation for visualsemantic alignment. To achieve effective prompt information integration, we further design a weak prompt fusion mechanism for the shallow layers and a strong prompt fusion mechanism for the deep layers in the network. Through the collaboration of visual and semantic prompts, we can obtain discriminative semantic-related features for generalized zero-shot image recognition. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework consistently achieves favorable performance in both conventional zero-shot learning and generalized zero-shot learning benchmarks compared to other state-of-the-art methods.

Prosody-Enhanced Acoustic Pre-training and Acoustic-Disentangled Prosody Adapting for Movie Dubbing

Movie dubbing describes the process of transforming a script into speech that aligns temporally and emotionally with a given movie clip while exemplifying the speaker's voice demonstrated in a short reference audio clip. This task demands the model bridge character performances and complicated prosody structures to build a high-quality video-synchronized dubbing track. The limited scale of movie dubbing datasets, along with the background noise inherent in audio data, hinder the acoustic modeling performance of trained models. To address these issues, we propose an acoustic-prosody disentangled two-stage method to achieve high-quality dubbing generation with precise prosody alignment. First, we propose a prosody-enhanced acoustic pre-training to develop robust acoustic modeling capabilities. Then, we freeze the pre-trained acoustic system and design a disentangled framework to model prosodic text features and dubbing style while maintaining acoustic quality. Additionally, we incorporate an in-domain emotion analysis module to reduce the impact of visual domain shifts across different movies, thereby enhancing emotion-prosody alignment. Extensive experiments show that our method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art models on two primary benchmarks. The demos are available at https://zzdoog.github.io/ProDubber/.

Exploring Primitive Visual Measurement Understanding and the Role of Output Format in Learning in Vision-Language Models

This work investigates the capabilities of current vision-language models (VLMs) in visual understanding and attribute measurement of primitive shapes using a benchmark focused on controlled 2D shape configurations with variations in spatial positioning, occlusion, rotation, size, and shape attributes such as type, quadrant, center-coordinates, rotation, occlusion status, and color as shown in Figure 1 and supplementary Figures S3-S81. We fine-tune state-of-the-art VLMs (2B-8B parameters) using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and validate them on multiple out-of-domain (OD) scenarios from our proposed benchmark. Our findings reveal that coherent sentence-based outputs outperform tuple formats, particularly in OD scenarios with large domain gaps. Additionally, we demonstrate that scaling numeric tokens during loss computation enhances numerical approximation capabilities, further improving performance on spatial and measurement tasks. These results highlight the importance of output format design, loss scaling strategies, and robust generalization techniques in enhancing the training and fine-tuning of VLMs, particularly for tasks requiring precise spatial approximations and strong OD generalization.

Adapter-Enhanced Semantic Prompting for Continual Learning

Continual learning (CL) enables models to adapt to evolving data streams. A major challenge of CL is catastrophic forgetting, where new knowledge will overwrite previously acquired knowledge. Traditional methods usually retain the past data for replay or add additional branches in the model to learn new knowledge, which has high memory requirements. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight CL framework, Adapter-Enhanced Semantic Prompting (AESP), which integrates prompt tuning and adapter techniques. Specifically, we design semantic-guided prompts to enhance the generalization ability of visual features and utilize adapters to efficiently fuse the semantic information, aiming to learn more adaptive features for the continual learning task. Furthermore, to choose the right task prompt for feature adaptation, we have developed a novel matching mechanism for prompt selection. Extensive experiments on three CL datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves favorable performance across multiple metrics, showing its potential for advancing CL.

EmoDubber: Towards High Quality and Emotion Controllable Movie Dubbing

Given a piece of text, a video clip, and a reference audio, the movie dubbing task aims to generate speech that aligns with the video while cloning the desired voice. The existing methods have two primary deficiencies: (1) They struggle to simultaneously hold audio-visual sync and achieve clear pronunciation; (2) They lack the capacity to express user-defined emotions. To address these problems, we propose EmoDubber, an emotion-controllable dubbing architecture that allows users to specify emotion type and emotional intensity while satisfying high-quality lip sync and pronunciation. Specifically, we first design Lip-related Prosody Aligning (LPA), which focuses on learning the inherent consistency between lip motion and prosody variation by duration level contrastive learning to incorporate reasonable alignment. Then, we design Pronunciation Enhancing (PE) strategy to fuse the video-level phoneme sequences by efficient conformer to improve speech intelligibility. Next, the speaker identity adapting module aims to decode acoustics prior and inject the speaker style embedding. After that, the proposed Flow-based User Emotion Controlling (FUEC) is used to synthesize waveform by flow matching prediction network conditioned on acoustics prior. In this process, the FUEC determines the gradient direction and guidance scale based on the user's emotion instructions by the positive and negative guidance mechanism, which focuses on amplifying the desired emotion while suppressing others. Extensive experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate favorable performance compared to several state-of-the-art methods.

Generating High-quality Symbolic Music Using Fine-grained Discriminators

Existing symbolic music generation methods usually utilize discriminator to improve the quality of generated music via global perception of music. However, considering the complexity of information in music, such as rhythm and melody, a single discriminator cannot fully reflect the differences in these two primary dimensions of music. In this work, we propose to decouple the melody and rhythm from music, and design corresponding fine-grained discriminators to tackle the aforementioned issues. Specifically, equipped with a pitch augmentation strategy, the melody discriminator discerns the melody variations presented by the generated samples. By contrast, the rhythm discriminator, enhanced with bar-level relative positional encoding, focuses on the velocity of generated notes. Such a design allows the generator to be more explicitly aware of which aspects should be adjusted in the generated music, making it easier to mimic human-composed music. Experimental results on the POP909 benchmark demonstrate the favorable performance of the proposed method compared to several state-of-the-art methods in terms of both objective and subjective metrics.

Structural Attention: Rethinking Transformer for Unpaired Medical Image Synthesis

Unpaired medical image synthesis aims to provide complementary information for an accurate clinical diagnostics, and address challenges in obtaining aligned multi-modal medical scans. Transformer-based models excel in imaging translation tasks thanks to their ability to capture long-range dependencies. Although effective in supervised training settings, their performance falters in unpaired image synthesis, particularly in synthesizing structural details. This paper empirically demonstrates that, lacking strong inductive biases, Transformer can converge to non-optimal solutions in the absence of paired data. To address this, we introduce UNet Structured Transformer (UNest), a novel architecture incorporating structural inductive biases for unpaired medical image synthesis. We leverage the foundational Segment-Anything Model to precisely extract the foreground structure and perform structural attention within the main anatomy. This guides the model to learn key anatomical regions, thus improving structural synthesis under the lack of supervision in unpaired training. Evaluated on two public datasets, spanning three modalities, i.e., MR, CT, and PET, UNest improves recent methods by up to 19.30% across six medical image synthesis tasks. Our code is released at https://github.com/HieuPhan33/MICCAI2024-UNest.