Multi-Modal Mutual Attention and Iterative Interaction for Referring Image Segmentation

We address the problem of referring image segmentation that aims to generate a mask for the object specified by a natural language expression. Many recent works utilize Transformer to extract features for the target object by aggregating the attended visual regions. However, the generic attention mechanism in Transformer only uses the language input for attention weight calculation, which does not explicitly fuse language features in its output. Thus, its output feature is dominated by vision information, which limits the model to comprehensively understand the multi-modal information, and brings uncertainty for the subsequent mask decoder to extract the output mask. To address this issue, we propose Multi-Modal Mutual Attention ($\mathrm{M^3Att}$) and Multi-Modal Mutual Decoder ($\mathrm{M^3Dec}$) that better fuse information from the two input modalities. Based on {$\mathrm{M^3Dec}$}, we further propose Iterative Multi-modal Interaction ($\mathrm{IMI}$) to allow continuous and in-depth interactions between language and vision features. Furthermore, we introduce Language Feature Reconstruction ($\mathrm{LFR}$) to prevent the language information from being lost or distorted in the extracted feature. Extensive experiments show that our proposed approach significantly improves the baseline and outperforms state-of-the-art referring image segmentation methods on RefCOCO series datasets consistently.

Hierarchical Integration Diffusion Model for Realistic Image Deblurring

Diffusion models (DMs) have recently been introduced in image deblurring and exhibited promising performance, particularly in terms of details reconstruction. However, the diffusion model requires a large number of inference iterations to recover the clean image from pure Gaussian noise, which consumes massive computational resources. Moreover, the distribution synthesized by the diffusion model is often misaligned with the target results, leading to restrictions in distortion-based metrics. To address the above issues, we propose the Hierarchical Integration Diffusion Model (HI-Diff), for realistic image deblurring. Specifically, we perform the DM in a highly compacted latent space to generate the prior feature for the deblurring process. The deblurring process is implemented by a regression-based method to obtain better distortion accuracy. Meanwhile, the highly compact latent space ensures the efficiency of the DM. Furthermore, we design the hierarchical integration module to fuse the prior into the regression-based model from multiple scales, enabling better generalization in complex blurry scenarios. Comprehensive experiments on synthetic and real-world blur datasets demonstrate that our HI-Diff outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Code and trained models are available at https://github.com/zhengchen1999/HI-Diff.

Equivariant Multi-Modality Image Fusion

Multi-modality image fusion is a technique used to combine information from different sensors or modalities, allowing the fused image to retain complementary features from each modality, such as functional highlights and texture details. However, effectively training such fusion models is difficult due to the lack of ground truth fusion data. To address this issue, we propose the Equivariant Multi-Modality imAge fusion (EMMA) paradigm for end-to-end self-supervised learning. Our approach is based on the prior knowledge that natural images are equivariant to specific transformations. Thus, we introduce a novel training framework that includes a fusion module and a learnable pseudo-sensing module, which allow the network training to follow the principles of physical sensing and imaging process, and meanwhile satisfy the equivariant prior for natural images. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that our method produces high-quality fusion results for both infrared-visible and medical images, while facilitating downstream multi-modal segmentation and detection tasks. The code will be released.

Weakly-Supervised Concealed Object Segmentation with SAM-based Pseudo Labeling and Multi-scale Feature Grouping

Weakly-Supervised Concealed Object Segmentation (WSCOS) aims to segment objects well blended with surrounding environments using sparsely-annotated data for model training. It remains a challenging task since (1) it is hard to distinguish concealed objects from the background due to the intrinsic similarity and (2) the sparsely-annotated training data only provide weak supervision for model learning. In this paper, we propose a new WSCOS method to address these two challenges. To tackle the intrinsic similarity challenge, we design a multi-scale feature grouping module that first groups features at different granularities and then aggregates these grouping results. By grouping similar features together, it encourages segmentation coherence, helping obtain complete segmentation results for both single and multiple-object images. For the weak supervision challenge, we utilize the recently-proposed vision foundation model, Segment Anything Model (SAM), and use the provided sparse annotations as prompts to generate segmentation masks, which are used to train the model. To alleviate the impact of low-quality segmentation masks, we further propose a series of strategies, including multi-augmentation result ensemble, entropy-based pixel-level weighting, and entropy-based image-level selection. These strategies help provide more reliable supervision to train the segmentation model. We verify the effectiveness of our method on various WSCOS tasks, and experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on these tasks.

Binarized Spectral Compressive Imaging

Existing deep learning models for hyperspectral image (HSI) reconstruction achieve good performance but require powerful hardwares with enormous memory and computational resources. Consequently, these methods can hardly be deployed on resource-limited mobile devices. In this paper, we propose a novel method, Binarized Spectral-Redistribution Network (BiSRNet), for efficient and practical HSI restoration from compressed measurement in snapshot compressive imaging (SCI) systems. Firstly, we redesign a compact and easy-to-deploy base model to be binarized. Then we present the basic unit, Binarized Spectral-Redistribution Convolution (BiSR-Conv). BiSR-Conv can adaptively redistribute the HSI representations before binarizing activation and uses a scalable hyperbolic tangent function to closer approximate the Sign function in backpropagation. Based on our BiSR-Conv, we customize four binarized convolutional modules to address the dimension mismatch and propagate full-precision information throughout the whole network. Finally, our BiSRNet is derived by using the proposed techniques to binarize the base model. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative experiments manifest that our proposed BiSRNet outperforms state-of-the-art binarization methods and achieves comparable performance with full-precision algorithms. Code and models will be released at https://github.com/caiyuanhao1998/BiSCI and https://github.com/caiyuanhao1998/MST

Multi-Robot Coordination and Layout Design for Automated Warehousing

With the rapid progress in Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF), researchers have studied how MAPF algorithms can be deployed to coordinate hundreds of robots in large automated warehouses. While most works try to improve the throughput of such warehouses by developing better MAPF algorithms, we focus on improving the throughput by optimizing the warehouse layout. We show that, even with state-of-the-art MAPF algorithms, commonly used human-designed layouts can lead to congestion for warehouses with large numbers of robots and thus have limited scalability. We extend existing automatic scenario generation methods to optimize warehouse layouts. Results show that our optimized warehouse layouts (1) reduce traffic congestion and thus improve throughput, (2) improve the scalability of the automated warehouses by doubling the number of robots in some cases, and (3) are capable of generating layouts with user-specified diversity measures. We include the source code at: https://github.com/lunjohnzhang/warehouse_env_gen_public

Spectral Enhanced Rectangle Transformer for Hyperspectral Image Denoising

Denoising is a crucial step for hyperspectral image (HSI) applications. Though witnessing the great power of deep learning, existing HSI denoising methods suffer from limitations in capturing the non-local self-similarity. Transformers have shown potential in capturing long-range dependencies, but few attempts have been made with specifically designed Transformer to model the spatial and spectral correlation in HSIs. In this paper, we address these issues by proposing a spectral enhanced rectangle Transformer, driving it to explore the non-local spatial similarity and global spectral low-rank property of HSIs. For the former, we exploit the rectangle self-attention horizontally and vertically to capture the non-local similarity in the spatial domain. For the latter, we design a spectral enhancement module that is capable of extracting global underlying low-rank property of spatial-spectral cubes to suppress noise, while enabling the interactions among non-overlapping spatial rectangles. Extensive experiments have been conducted on both synthetic noisy HSIs and real noisy HSIs, showing the effectiveness of our proposed method in terms of both objective metric and subjective visual quality. The code is available at https://github.com/MyuLi/SERT.

LG-BPN: Local and Global Blind-Patch Network for Self-Supervised Real-World Denoising

Despite the significant results on synthetic noise under simplified assumptions, most self-supervised denoising methods fail under real noise due to the strong spatial noise correlation, including the advanced self-supervised blind-spot networks (BSNs). For recent methods targeting real-world denoising, they either suffer from ignoring this spatial correlation, or are limited by the destruction of fine textures for under-considering the correlation. In this paper, we present a novel method called LG-BPN for self-supervised real-world denoising, which takes the spatial correlation statistic into our network design for local detail restoration, and also brings the long-range dependencies modeling ability to previously CNN-based BSN methods. First, based on the correlation statistic, we propose a densely-sampled patch-masked convolution module. By taking more neighbor pixels with low noise correlation into account, we enable a denser local receptive field, preserving more useful information for enhanced fine structure recovery. Second, we propose a dilated Transformer block to allow distant context exploitation in BSN. This global perception addresses the intrinsic deficiency of BSN, whose receptive field is constrained by the blind spot requirement, which can not be fully resolved by the previous CNN-based BSNs. These two designs enable LG-BPN to fully exploit both the detailed structure and the global interaction in a blind manner. Extensive results on real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method. https://github.com/Wang-XIaoDingdd/LGBPN

Iterative Soft Shrinkage Learning for Efficient Image Super-Resolution

The field of image super-resolution (SR) has witnessed extensive neural network designs from CNN to transformer architectures. However, prevailing SR models suffer from prohibitive memory footprint and intensive computations, which limits further deployment on computational-constrained platforms. In this work, we investigate the potential of network pruning for super-resolution to take advantage of off-the-shelf network designs and reduce the underlying computational overhead. Two main challenges remain in applying pruning methods for SR. First, the widely-used filter pruning technique reflects limited granularity and restricted adaptability to diverse network structures. Second, existing pruning methods generally operate upon a pre-trained network for the sparse structure determination, failing to get rid of dense model training in the traditional SR paradigm. To address these challenges, we adopt unstructured pruning with sparse models directly trained from scratch. Specifically, we propose a novel Iterative Soft Shrinkage-Percentage (ISS-P) method by optimizing the sparse structure of a randomly initialized network at each iteration and tweaking unimportant weights with a small amount proportional to the magnitude scale on-the-fly. We observe that the proposed ISS-P could dynamically learn sparse structures adapting to the optimization process and preserve the sparse model's trainability by yielding a more regularized gradient throughput. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed ISS-P compared with state-of-the-art methods over diverse network architectures.

DiffIR: Efficient Diffusion Model for Image Restoration

Diffusion model (DM) has achieved SOTA performance by modeling the image synthesis process into a sequential application of a denoising network. However, different from image synthesis generating each pixel from scratch, most pixels of image restoration (IR) are given. Thus, for IR, traditional DMs running massive iterations on a large model to estimate whole images or feature maps is inefficient. To address this issue, we propose an efficient DM for IR (DiffIR), which consists of a compact IR prior extraction network (CPEN), dynamic IR transformer (DIRformer), and denoising network. Specifically, DiffIR has two training stages: pretraining and training DM. In pretraining, we input ground-truth images into CPEN$_{S1}$ to capture a compact IR prior representation (IPR) to guide DIRformer. In the second stage, we train the DM to directly estimate the same IRP as pretrained CPEN$_{S1}$ only using LQ images. We observe that since the IPR is only a compact vector, DiffIR can use fewer iterations than traditional DM to obtain accurate estimations and generate more stable and realistic results. Since the iterations are few, our DiffIR can adopt a joint optimization of CPEN$_{S2}$, DIRformer, and denoising network, which can further reduce the estimation error influence. We conduct extensive experiments on several IR tasks and achieve SOTA performance while consuming less computational costs.