EA-VTR: Event-Aware Video-Text Retrieval

Understanding the content of events occurring in the video and their inherent temporal logic is crucial for video-text retrieval. However, web-crawled pre-training datasets often lack sufficient event information, and the widely adopted video-level cross-modal contrastive learning also struggles to capture detailed and complex video-text event alignment. To address these challenges, we make improvements from both data and model perspectives. In terms of pre-training data, we focus on supplementing the missing specific event content and event temporal transitions with the proposed event augmentation strategies. Based on the event-augmented data, we construct a novel Event-Aware Video-Text Retrieval model, ie, EA-VTR, which achieves powerful video-text retrieval ability through superior video event awareness. EA-VTR can efficiently encode frame-level and video-level visual representations simultaneously, enabling detailed event content and complex event temporal cross-modal alignment, ultimately enhancing the comprehensive understanding of video events. Our method not only significantly outperforms existing approaches on multiple datasets for Text-to-Video Retrieval and Video Action Recognition tasks, but also demonstrates superior event content perceive ability on Multi-event Video-Text Retrieval and Video Moment Retrieval tasks, as well as outstanding event temporal logic understanding ability on Test of Time task.

How to Make Cross Encoder a Good Teacher for Efficient Image-Text Retrieval?

Dominant dual-encoder models enable efficient image-text retrieval but suffer from limited accuracy while the cross-encoder models offer higher accuracy at the expense of efficiency. Distilling cross-modality matching knowledge from cross-encoder to dual-encoder provides a natural approach to harness their strengths. Thus we investigate the following valuable question: how to make cross-encoder a good teacher for dual-encoder? Our findings are threefold:(1) Cross-modal similarity score distribution of cross-encoder is more concentrated while the result of dual-encoder is nearly normal making vanilla logit distillation less effective. However ranking distillation remains practical as it is not affected by the score distribution.(2) Only the relative order between hard negatives conveys valid knowledge while the order information between easy negatives has little significance.(3) Maintaining the coordination between distillation loss and dual-encoder training loss is beneficial for knowledge transfer. Based on these findings we propose a novel Contrastive Partial Ranking Distillation (CPRD) method which implements the objective of mimicking relative order between hard negative samples with contrastive learning. This approach coordinates with the training of the dual-encoder effectively transferring valid knowledge from the cross-encoder to the dual-encoder. Extensive experiments on image-text retrieval and ranking tasks show that our method surpasses other distillation methods and significantly improves the accuracy of dual-encoder.

PosterLLaVa: Constructing a Unified Multi-modal Layout Generator with LLM

Layout generation is the keystone in achieving automated graphic design, requiring arranging the position and size of various multi-modal design elements in a visually pleasing and constraint-following manner. Previous approaches are either inefficient for large-scale applications or lack flexibility for varying design requirements. Our research introduces a unified framework for automated graphic layout generation, leveraging the multi-modal large language model (MLLM) to accommodate diverse design tasks. In contrast, our data-driven method employs structured text (JSON format) and visual instruction tuning to generate layouts under specific visual and textual constraints, including user-defined natural language specifications. We conducted extensive experiments and achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on public multi-modal layout generation benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method. Moreover, recognizing existing datasets' limitations in capturing the complexity of real-world graphic designs, we propose two new datasets for much more challenging tasks (user-constrained generation and complicated poster), further validating our model's utility in real-life settings. Marking by its superior accessibility and adaptability, this approach further automates large-scale graphic design tasks. The code and datasets will be publicly available on https://github.com/posterllava/PosterLLaVA.

SphereDiffusion: Spherical Geometry-Aware Distortion Resilient Diffusion Model

Controllable spherical panoramic image generation holds substantial applicative potential across a variety of domains.However, it remains a challenging task due to the inherent spherical distortion and geometry characteristics, resulting in low-quality content generation.In this paper, we introduce a novel framework of SphereDiffusion to address these unique challenges, for better generating high-quality and precisely controllable spherical panoramic images.For the spherical distortion characteristic, we embed the semantics of the distorted object with text encoding, then explicitly construct the relationship with text-object correspondence to better use the pre-trained knowledge of the planar images.Meanwhile, we employ a deformable technique to mitigate the semantic deviation in latent space caused by spherical distortion.For the spherical geometry characteristic, in virtue of spherical rotation invariance, we improve the data diversity and optimization objectives in the training process, enabling the model to better learn the spherical geometry characteristic.Furthermore, we enhance the denoising process of the diffusion model, enabling it to effectively use the learned geometric characteristic to ensure the boundary continuity of the generated images.With these specific techniques, experiments on Structured3D dataset show that SphereDiffusion significantly improves the quality of controllable spherical image generation and relatively reduces around 35% FID on average.

RecDCL: Dual Contrastive Learning for Recommendation

Self-supervised recommendation (SSR) has achieved great success in mining the potential interacted behaviors for collaborative filtering in recent years. As a major branch, Contrastive Learning (CL) based SSR conquers data sparsity in Web platforms by contrasting the embedding between raw data and augmented data. However, existing CL-based SSR methods mostly focus on contrasting in a batch-wise way, failing to exploit potential regularity in the feature-wise dimension, leading to redundant solutions during the representation learning process of users (items) from Websites. Furthermore, the joint benefits of utilizing both Batch-wise CL (BCL) and Feature-wise CL (FCL) for recommendations remain underexplored. To address these issues, we investigate the relationship of objectives between BCL and FCL. Our study suggests a cooperative benefit of employing both methods, as evidenced from theoretical and experimental perspectives. Based on these insights, we propose a dual CL method for recommendation, referred to as RecDCL. RecDCL first eliminates redundant solutions on user-item positive pairs in a feature-wise manner. It then optimizes the uniform distributions within users and items using a polynomial kernel from an FCL perspective. Finally, it generates contrastive embedding on output vectors in a batch-wise objective. We conduct experiments on four widely-used benchmarks and an industrial dataset. The results consistently demonstrate that the proposed RecDCL outperforms the state-of-the-art GNNs-based and SSL-based models (with up to a 5.65\% improvement in terms of Recall@20), thereby confirming the effectiveness of the joint-wise objective. All source codes used in this paper are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/THUDM/RecDCL}}.

PhotoMaker: Customizing Realistic Human Photos via Stacked ID Embedding

Recent advances in text-to-image generation have made remarkable progress in synthesizing realistic human photos conditioned on given text prompts. However, existing personalized generation methods cannot simultaneously satisfy the requirements of high efficiency, promising identity (ID) fidelity, and flexible text controllability. In this work, we introduce PhotoMaker, an efficient personalized text-to-image generation method, which mainly encodes an arbitrary number of input ID images into a stack ID embedding for preserving ID information. Such an embedding, serving as a unified ID representation, can not only encapsulate the characteristics of the same input ID comprehensively, but also accommodate the characteristics of different IDs for subsequent integration. This paves the way for more intriguing and practically valuable applications. Besides, to drive the training of our PhotoMaker, we propose an ID-oriented data construction pipeline to assemble the training data. Under the nourishment of the dataset constructed through the proposed pipeline, our PhotoMaker demonstrates better ID preservation ability than test-time fine-tuning based methods, yet provides significant speed improvements, high-quality generation results, strong generalization capabilities, and a wide range of applications. Our project page is available at https://photo-maker.github.io/

CustomNet: Zero-shot Object Customization with Variable-Viewpoints in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Incorporating a customized object into image generation presents an attractive feature in text-to-image generation. However, existing optimization-based and encoder-based methods are hindered by drawbacks such as time-consuming optimization, insufficient identity preservation, and a prevalent copy-pasting effect. To overcome these limitations, we introduce CustomNet, a novel object customization approach that explicitly incorporates 3D novel view synthesis capabilities into the object customization process. This integration facilitates the adjustment of spatial position relationships and viewpoints, yielding diverse outputs while effectively preserving object identity. Moreover, we introduce delicate designs to enable location control and flexible background control through textual descriptions or specific user-defined images, overcoming the limitations of existing 3D novel view synthesis methods. We further leverage a dataset construction pipeline that can better handle real-world objects and complex backgrounds. Equipped with these designs, our method facilitates zero-shot object customization without test-time optimization, offering simultaneous control over the viewpoints, location, and background. As a result, our CustomNet ensures enhanced identity preservation and generates diverse, harmonious outputs.

StyleAdapter: A Single-Pass LoRA-Free Model for Stylized Image Generation

This paper presents a LoRA-free method for stylized image generation that takes a text prompt and style reference images as inputs and produces an output image in a single pass. Unlike existing methods that rely on training a separate LoRA for each style, our method can adapt to various styles with a unified model. However, this poses two challenges: 1) the prompt loses controllability over the generated content, and 2) the output image inherits both the semantic and style features of the style reference image, compromising its content fidelity. To address these challenges, we introduce StyleAdapter, a model that comprises two components: a two-path cross-attention module (TPCA) and three decoupling strategies. These components enable our model to process the prompt and style reference features separately and reduce the strong coupling between the semantic and style information in the style references. StyleAdapter can generate high-quality images that match the content of the prompts and adopt the style of the references (even for unseen styles) in a single pass, which is more flexible and efficient than previous methods. Experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the superiority of our method over previous works.

Towards Unseen Triples: Effective Text-Image-joint Learning for Scene Graph Generation

Scene Graph Generation (SGG) aims to structurally and comprehensively represent objects and their connections in images, it can significantly benefit scene understanding and other related downstream tasks. Existing SGG models often struggle to solve the long-tailed problem caused by biased datasets. However, even if these models can fit specific datasets better, it may be hard for them to resolve the unseen triples which are not included in the training set. Most methods tend to feed a whole triple and learn the overall features based on statistical machine learning. Such models have difficulty predicting unseen triples because the objects and predicates in the training set are combined differently as novel triples in the test set. In this work, we propose a Text-Image-joint Scene Graph Generation (TISGG) model to resolve the unseen triples and improve the generalisation capability of the SGG models. We propose a Joint Fearture Learning (JFL) module and a Factual Knowledge based Refinement (FKR) module to learn object and predicate categories separately at the feature level and align them with corresponding visual features so that the model is no longer limited to triples matching. Besides, since we observe the long-tailed problem also affects the generalization ability, we design a novel balanced learning strategy, including a Charater Guided Sampling (CGS) and an Informative Re-weighting (IR) module, to provide tailor-made learning methods for each predicate according to their characters. Extensive experiments show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance. In more detail, TISGG boosts the performances by 11.7% of zR@20(zero-shot recall) on the PredCls sub-task on the Visual Genome dataset.

Sticker820K: Empowering Interactive Retrieval with Stickers

Stickers have become a ubiquitous part of modern-day communication, conveying complex emotions through visual imagery. To facilitate the development of more powerful algorithms for analyzing stickers, we propose a large-scale Chinese sticker dataset, namely Sticker820K, which consists of 820k image-text pairs. Each sticker has rich and high-quality textual annotations, including descriptions, optical characters, emotional labels, and style classifications. Although vision-language tasks in the domain of natural images have been well studied, directly applying the those models, such as CLIP, to sticker data is not an optimal solution due to the discrepant nature between natural and emotive image data. Therefore, we propose StickerCLIP as a benchmark model on the Sticker820K dataset. For the text-to-image retrieval task, our StickerCLIP demonstrates strong superiority over the CLIP, which achieves an absolute gain of 66.0\% in mean recall on the Sticker820K test set. Additionally, we endeavor to extend the recently popularized LLM by means of prompt tuning, integrating its ability for sticker retrieval and allowing users to retrieve stickers through instructions. We validate the feasibility of this method, demonstrating the immense potential of prompt tuning in expanding LLM abilities while not affecting the quality of upstream tasks.