ControlLLM: Augment Language Models with Tools by Searching on Graphs

We present ControlLLM, a novel framework that enables large language models (LLMs) to utilize multi-modal tools for solving complex real-world tasks. Despite the remarkable performance of LLMs, they still struggle with tool invocation due to ambiguous user prompts, inaccurate tool selection and parameterization, and inefficient tool scheduling. To overcome these challenges, our framework comprises three key components: (1) a \textit{task decomposer} that breaks down a complex task into clear subtasks with well-defined inputs and outputs; (2) a \textit{Thoughts-on-Graph (ToG) paradigm} that searches the optimal solution path on a pre-built tool graph, which specifies the parameter and dependency relations among different tools; and (3) an \textit{execution engine with a rich toolbox} that interprets the solution path and runs the tools efficiently on different computational devices. We evaluate our framework on diverse tasks involving image, audio, and video processing, demonstrating its superior accuracy, efficiency, and versatility compared to existing methods. The code is at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/ControlLLM .

Mini-DALLE3: Interactive Text to Image by Prompting Large Language Models

The revolution of artificial intelligence content generation has been rapidly accelerated with the booming text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models. Within just two years of development, it was unprecedentedly of high-quality, diversity, and creativity that the state-of-the-art models could generate. However, a prevalent limitation persists in the effective communication with these popular T2I models, such as Stable Diffusion, using natural language descriptions. This typically makes an engaging image hard to obtain without expertise in prompt engineering with complex word compositions, magic tags, and annotations. Inspired by the recently released DALLE3 - a T2I model directly built-in ChatGPT that talks human language, we revisit the existing T2I systems endeavoring to align human intent and introduce a new task - interactive text to image (iT2I), where people can interact with LLM for interleaved high-quality image generation/edit/refinement and question answering with stronger images and text correspondences using natural language. In addressing the iT2I problem, we present a simple approach that augments LLMs for iT2I with prompting techniques and off-the-shelf T2I models. We evaluate our approach for iT2I in a variety of common-used scenarios under different LLMs, e.g., ChatGPT, LLAMA, Baichuan, and InternLM. We demonstrate that our approach could be a convenient and low-cost way to introduce the iT2I ability for any existing LLMs and any text-to-image models without any training while bringing little degradation on LLMs' inherent capabilities in, e.g., question answering and code generation. We hope this work could draw broader attention and provide inspiration for boosting user experience in human-machine interactions alongside the image quality of the next-generation T2I systems.

Denoising Diffusion Semantic Segmentation with Mask Prior Modeling

The evolution of semantic segmentation has long been dominated by learning more discriminative image representations for classifying each pixel. Despite the prominent advancements, the priors of segmentation masks themselves, e.g., geometric and semantic constraints, are still under-explored. In this paper, we propose to ameliorate the semantic segmentation quality of existing discriminative approaches with a mask prior modeled by a recently-developed denoising diffusion generative model. Beginning with a unified architecture that adapts diffusion models for mask prior modeling, we focus this work on a specific instantiation with discrete diffusion and identify a variety of key design choices for its successful application. Our exploratory analysis revealed several important findings, including: (1) a simple integration of diffusion models into semantic segmentation is not sufficient, and a poorly-designed diffusion process might lead to degradation in segmentation performance; (2) during the training, the object to which noise is added is more important than the type of noise; (3) during the inference, the strict diffusion denoising scheme may not be essential and can be relaxed to a simpler scheme that even works better. We evaluate the proposed prior modeling with several off-the-shelf segmentors, and our experimental results on ADE20K and Cityscapes demonstrate that our approach could achieve competitively quantitative performance and more appealing visual quality.

Hybrid Spectral Denoising Transformer with Learnable Query

In this paper, we present a Hybrid Spectral Denoising Transformer (HSDT) for hyperspectral image denoising. Challenges in adapting transformer for HSI arise from the capabilities to tackle existing limitations of CNN-based methods in capturing the global and local spatial-spectral correlations while maintaining efficiency and flexibility. To address these issues, we introduce a hybrid approach that combines the advantages of both models with a Spatial-Spectral Separable Convolution (S3Conv), Guided Spectral Self-Attention (GSSA), and Self-Modulated Feed-Forward Network (SM-FFN). Our S3Conv works as a lightweight alternative to 3D convolution, which extracts more spatial-spectral correlated features while keeping the flexibility to tackle HSIs with an arbitrary number of bands. These features are then adaptively processed by GSSA which per-forms 3D self-attention across the spectral bands, guided by a set of learnable queries that encode the spectral signatures. This not only enriches our model with powerful capabilities for identifying global spectral correlations but also maintains linear complexity. Moreover, our SM-FFN proposes the self-modulation that intensifies the activations of more informative regions, which further strengthens the aggregated features. Extensive experiments are conducted on various datasets under both simulated and real-world noise, and it shows that our HSDT significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods while maintaining low computational overhead.

Hyperspectral Image Super Resolution with Real Unaligned RGB Guidance

Fusion-based hyperspectral image (HSI) super-resolution has become increasingly prevalent for its capability to integrate high-frequency spatial information from the paired high-resolution (HR) RGB reference image. However, most of the existing methods either heavily rely on the accurate alignment between low-resolution (LR) HSIs and RGB images, or can only deal with simulated unaligned RGB images generated by rigid geometric transformations, which weakens their effectiveness for real scenes. In this paper, we explore the fusion-based HSI super-resolution with real RGB reference images that have both rigid and non-rigid misalignments. To properly address the limitations of existing methods for unaligned reference images, we propose an HSI fusion network with heterogenous feature extractions, multi-stage feature alignments, and attentive feature fusion. Specifically, our network first transforms the input HSI and RGB images into two sets of multi-scale features with an HSI encoder and an RGB encoder, respectively. The features of RGB reference images are then processed by a multi-stage alignment module to explicitly align the features of RGB reference with the LR HSI. Finally, the aligned features of RGB reference are further adjusted by an adaptive attention module to focus more on discriminative regions before sending them to the fusion decoder to generate the reconstructed HR HSI. Additionally, we collect a real-world HSI fusion dataset, consisting of paired HSI and unaligned RGB reference, to support the evaluation of the proposed model for real scenes. Extensive experiments are conducted on both simulated and our real-world datasets, and it shows that our method obtains a clear improvement over existing single-image and fusion-based super-resolution methods on quantitative assessment as well as visual comparison.

Mixed Attention Network for Hyperspectral Image Denoising

Hyperspectral image denoising is unique for the highly similar and correlated spectral information that should be properly considered. However, existing methods show limitations in exploring the spectral correlations across different bands and feature interactions within each band. Besides, the low- and high-level features usually exhibit different importance for different spatial-spectral regions, which is not fully explored for current algorithms as well. In this paper, we present a Mixed Attention Network (MAN) that simultaneously considers the inter- and intra-spectral correlations as well as the interactions between low- and high-level spatial-spectral meaningful features. Specifically, we introduce a multi-head recurrent spectral attention that efficiently integrates the inter-spectral features across all the spectral bands. These features are further enhanced with a progressive spectral channel attention by exploring the intra-spectral relationships. Moreover, we propose an attentive skip-connection that adaptively controls the proportion of the low- and high-level spatial-spectral features from the encoder and decoder to better enhance the aggregated features. Extensive experiments show that our MAN outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on simulated and real noise settings while maintaining a low cost of parameters and running time.

Improved Quasi-Recurrent Neural Network for Hyperspectral Image Denoising

Hyperspectral image is unique and useful for its abundant spectral bands, but it subsequently requires extra elaborated treatments of the spatial-spectral correlation as well as the global correlation along the spectrum for building a robust and powerful HSI restoration algorithm. By considering such HSI characteristics, 3D Quasi-Recurrent Neural Network (QRNN3D) is one of the HSI denoising networks that has been shown to achieve excellent performance and flexibility. In this paper, we show that with a few simple modifications, the performance of QRNN3D could be substantially improved further. Our modifications are based on the finding that through QRNN3D is powerful for modeling spectral correlation, it neglects the proper treatment between features from different sources and its training strategy is suboptimal. We, therefore, introduce an adaptive fusion module to replace its vanilla additive skip connection to better fuse the features of the encoder and decoder. We additionally identify several important techniques to further enhance the performance, which includes removing batch normalization, use of extra frequency loss, and learning rate warm-up. Experimental results on various noise settings demonstrate the effectiveness and superior performance of our method.

Deep Plug-and-Play Prior for Hyperspectral Image Restoration

Deep-learning-based hyperspectral image (HSI) restoration methods have gained great popularity for their remarkable performance but often demand expensive network retraining whenever the specifics of task changes. In this paper, we propose to restore HSIs in a unified approach with an effective plug-and-play method, which can jointly retain the flexibility of optimization-based methods and utilize the powerful representation capability of deep neural networks. Specifically, we first develop a new deep HSI denoiser leveraging gated recurrent convolution units, short- and long-term skip connections, and an augmented noise level map to better exploit the abundant spatio-spectral information within HSIs. It, therefore, leads to the state-of-the-art performance on HSI denoising under both Gaussian and complex noise settings. Then, the proposed denoiser is inserted into the plug-and-play framework as a powerful implicit HSI prior to tackle various HSI restoration tasks. Through extensive experiments on HSI super-resolution, compressed sensing, and inpainting, we demonstrate that our approach often achieves superior performance, which is competitive with or even better than the state-of-the-art on each task, via a single model without any task-specific training.