SDSTrack: Self-Distillation Symmetric Adapter Learning for Multi-Modal Visual Object Tracking

Multimodal Visual Object Tracking (VOT) has recently gained significant attention due to its robustness. Early research focused on fully fine-tuning RGB-based trackers, which was inefficient and lacked generalized representation due to the scarcity of multimodal data. Therefore, recent studies have utilized prompt tuning to transfer pre-trained RGB-based trackers to multimodal data. However, the modality gap limits pre-trained knowledge recall, and the dominance of the RGB modality persists, preventing the full utilization of information from other modalities. To address these issues, we propose a novel symmetric multimodal tracking framework called SDSTrack. We introduce lightweight adaptation for efficient fine-tuning, which directly transfers the feature extraction ability from RGB to other domains with a small number of trainable parameters and integrates multimodal features in a balanced, symmetric manner. Furthermore, we design a complementary masked patch distillation strategy to enhance the robustness of trackers in complex environments, such as extreme weather, poor imaging, and sensor failure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SDSTrack outperforms state-of-the-art methods in various multimodal tracking scenarios, including RGB+Depth, RGB+Thermal, and RGB+Event tracking, and exhibits impressive results in extreme conditions. Our source code is available at https://github.com/hoqolo/SDSTrack.

Learning Unified Reference Representation for Unsupervised Multi-class Anomaly Detection

In the field of multi-class anomaly detection, reconstruction-based methods derived from single-class anomaly detection face the well-known challenge of ``learning shortcuts'', wherein the model fails to learn the patterns of normal samples as it should, opting instead for shortcuts such as identity mapping or artificial noise elimination. Consequently, the model becomes unable to reconstruct genuine anomalies as normal instances, resulting in a failure of anomaly detection. To counter this issue, we present a novel unified feature reconstruction-based anomaly detection framework termed RLR (Reconstruct features from a Learnable Reference representation). Unlike previous methods, RLR utilizes learnable reference representations to compel the model to learn normal feature patterns explicitly, thereby prevents the model from succumbing to the ``learning shortcuts'' issue. Additionally, RLR incorporates locality constraints into the learnable reference to facilitate more effective normal pattern capture and utilizes a masked learnable key attention mechanism to enhance robustness. Evaluation of RLR on the 15-category MVTec-AD dataset and the 12-category VisA dataset shows superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods under the unified setting. The code of RLR will be publicly available.

ManipVQA: Injecting Robotic Affordance and Physically Grounded Information into Multi-Modal Large Language Models

The integration of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with robotic systems has significantly enhanced the ability of robots to interpret and act upon natural language instructions. Despite these advancements, conventional MLLMs are typically trained on generic image-text pairs, lacking essential robotics knowledge such as affordances and physical knowledge, which hampers their efficacy in manipulation tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce ManipVQA, a novel framework designed to endow MLLMs with Manipulation-centric knowledge through a Visual Question-Answering format. This approach not only encompasses tool detection and affordance recognition but also extends to a comprehensive understanding of physical concepts. Our approach starts with collecting a varied set of images displaying interactive objects, which presents a broad range of challenges in tool object detection, affordance, and physical concept predictions. To seamlessly integrate this robotic-specific knowledge with the inherent vision-reasoning capabilities of MLLMs, we adopt a unified VQA format and devise a fine-tuning strategy that preserves the original vision-reasoning abilities while incorporating the new robotic insights. Empirical evaluations conducted in robotic simulators and across various vision task benchmarks demonstrate the robust performance of ManipVQA. Code and dataset will be made publicly available at https://github.com/SiyuanHuang95/ManipVQA.

PointSeg: A Training-Free Paradigm for 3D Scene Segmentation via Foundation Models

Recent success of vision foundation models have shown promising performance for the 2D perception tasks. However, it is difficult to train a 3D foundation network directly due to the limited dataset and it remains under explored whether existing foundation models can be lifted to 3D space seamlessly. In this paper, we present PointSeg, a novel training-free paradigm that leverages off-the-shelf vision foundation models to address 3D scene perception tasks. PointSeg can segment anything in 3D scene by acquiring accurate 3D prompts to align their corresponding pixels across frames. Concretely, we design a two-branch prompts learning structure to construct the 3D point-box prompts pairs, combining with the bidirectional matching strategy for accurate point and proposal prompts generation. Then, we perform the iterative post-refinement adaptively when cooperated with different vision foundation models. Moreover, we design a affinity-aware merging algorithm to improve the final ensemble masks. PointSeg demonstrates impressive segmentation performance across various datasets, all without training. Specifically, our approach significantly surpasses the state-of-the-art specialist model by 13.4$\%$, 11.3$\%$, and 12$\%$ mAP on ScanNet, ScanNet++, and KITTI-360 datasets, respectively. On top of that, PointSeg can incorporate with various segmentation models and even surpasses the supervised methods.

DiffuMatting: Synthesizing Arbitrary Objects with Matting-level Annotation

Due to the difficulty and labor-consuming nature of getting highly accurate or matting annotations, there only exists a limited amount of highly accurate labels available to the public. To tackle this challenge, we propose a DiffuMatting which inherits the strong Everything generation ability of diffusion and endows the power of "matting anything". Our DiffuMatting can 1). act as an anything matting factory with high accurate annotations 2). be well-compatible with community LoRAs or various conditional control approaches to achieve the community-friendly art design and controllable generation. Specifically, inspired by green-screen-matting, we aim to teach the diffusion model to paint on a fixed green screen canvas. To this end, a large-scale greenscreen dataset (Green100K) is collected as a training dataset for DiffuMatting. Secondly, a green background control loss is proposed to keep the drawing board as a pure green color to distinguish the foreground and background. To ensure the synthesized object has more edge details, a detailed-enhancement of transition boundary loss is proposed as a guideline to generate objects with more complicated edge structures. Aiming to simultaneously generate the object and its matting annotation, we build a matting head to make a green color removal in the latent space of the VAE decoder. Our DiffuMatting shows several potential applications (e.g., matting-data generator, community-friendly art design and controllable generation). As a matting-data generator, DiffuMatting synthesizes general object and portrait matting sets, effectively reducing the relative MSE error by 15.4% in General Object Matting and 11.4% in Portrait Matting tasks.

UniM-OV3D: Uni-Modality Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Understanding with Fine-Grained Feature Representation

3D open-vocabulary scene understanding aims to recognize arbitrary novel categories beyond the base label space. However, existing works not only fail to fully utilize all the available modal information in the 3D domain but also lack sufficient granularity in representing the features of each modality. In this paper, we propose a unified multimodal 3D open-vocabulary scene understanding network, namely UniM-OV3D, which aligns point clouds with image, language and depth. To better integrate global and local features of the point clouds, we design a hierarchical point cloud feature extraction module that learns comprehensive fine-grained feature representations. Further, to facilitate the learning of coarse-to-fine point-semantic representations from captions, we propose the utilization of hierarchical 3D caption pairs, capitalizing on geometric constraints across various viewpoints of 3D scenes. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method in open-vocabulary semantic and instance segmentation, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on both indoor and outdoor benchmarks such as ScanNet, ScanNet200, S3IDS and nuScenes. Code is available at https://github.com/hithqd/UniM-OV3D.

Density Matters: Improved Core-set for Active Domain Adaptive Segmentation

Active domain adaptation has emerged as a solution to balance the expensive annotation cost and the performance of trained models in semantic segmentation. However, existing works usually ignore the correlation between selected samples and its local context in feature space, which leads to inferior usage of annotation budgets. In this work, we revisit the theoretical bound of the classical Core-set method and identify that the performance is closely related to the local sample distribution around selected samples. To estimate the density of local samples efficiently, we introduce a local proxy estimator with Dynamic Masked Convolution and develop a Density-aware Greedy algorithm to optimize the bound. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach. Moreover, with very few labels, our scheme achieves comparable performance to the fully supervised counterpart.

ChatIllusion: Efficient-Aligning Interleaved Generation ability with Visual Instruction Model

As the capabilities of Large-Language Models (LLMs) become widely recognized, there is an increasing demand for human-machine chat applications. Human interaction with text often inherently invokes mental imagery, an aspect that existing LLM-based chatbots like GPT-4 do not currently emulate, as they are confined to generating text-only content. To bridge this gap, we introduce ChatIllusion, an advanced Generative multimodal large language model (MLLM) that combines the capabilities of LLM with not only visual comprehension but also creativity. Specifically, ChatIllusion integrates Stable Diffusion XL and Llama, which have been fine-tuned on modest image-caption data, to facilitate multiple rounds of illustrated chats. The central component of ChatIllusion is the "GenAdapter," an efficient approach that equips the multimodal language model with capabilities for visual representation, without necessitating modifications to the foundational model. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of our approach, showcasing its ability to produce diverse and superior-quality image outputs Simultaneously, it preserves semantic consistency and control over the dialogue, significantly enhancing the overall user's quality of experience (QoE). The code is available at https://github.com/litwellchi/ChatIllusion.

Dual Path Transformer with Partition Attention

This paper introduces a novel attention mechanism, called dual attention, which is both efficient and effective. The dual attention mechanism consists of two parallel components: local attention generated by Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and long-range attention generated by Vision Transformers (ViTs). To address the high computational complexity and memory footprint of vanilla Multi-Head Self-Attention (MHSA), we introduce a novel Multi-Head Partition-wise Attention (MHPA) mechanism. The partition-wise attention approach models both intra-partition and inter-partition attention simultaneously. Building on the dual attention block and partition-wise attention mechanism, we present a hierarchical vision backbone called DualFormer. We evaluate the effectiveness of our model on several computer vision tasks, including image classification on ImageNet, object detection on COCO, and semantic segmentation on Cityscapes. Specifically, the proposed DualFormer-XS achieves 81.5\% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, outperforming the recent state-of-the-art MPViT-XS by 0.6\% top-1 accuracy with much higher throughput.

Instruct2Act: Mapping Multi-modality Instructions to Robotic Actions with Large Language Model

Foundation models have made significant strides in various applications, including text-to-image generation, panoptic segmentation, and natural language processing. This paper presents Instruct2Act, a framework that utilizes Large Language Models to map multi-modal instructions to sequential actions for robotic manipulation tasks. Specifically, Instruct2Act employs the LLM model to generate Python programs that constitute a comprehensive perception, planning, and action loop for robotic tasks. In the perception section, pre-defined APIs are used to access multiple foundation models where the Segment Anything Model (SAM) accurately locates candidate objects, and CLIP classifies them. In this way, the framework leverages the expertise of foundation models and robotic abilities to convert complex high-level instructions into precise policy codes. Our approach is adjustable and flexible in accommodating various instruction modalities and input types and catering to specific task demands. We validated the practicality and efficiency of our approach by assessing it on robotic tasks in different scenarios within tabletop manipulation domains. Furthermore, our zero-shot method outperformed many state-of-the-art learning-based policies in several tasks. The code for our proposed approach is available at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/Instruct2Act, serving as a robust benchmark for high-level robotic instruction tasks with assorted modality inputs.