Camera Model Identification with SPAIR-Swin and Entropy based Non-Homogeneous Patches

Source camera model identification (SCMI) plays a pivotal role in image forensics with applications including authenticity verification and copyright protection. For identifying the camera model used to capture a given image, we propose SPAIR-Swin, a novel model combining a modified spatial attention mechanism and inverted residual block (SPAIR) with a Swin Transformer. SPAIR-Swin effectively captures both global and local features, enabling robust identification of artifacts such as noise patterns that are particularly effective for SCMI. Additionally, unlike conventional methods focusing on homogeneous patches, we propose a patch selection strategy for SCMI that emphasizes high-entropy regions rich in patterns and textures. Extensive evaluations on four benchmark SCMI datasets demonstrate that SPAIR-Swin outperforms existing methods, achieving patch-level accuracies of 99.45%, 98.39%, 99.45%, and 97.46% and image-level accuracies of 99.87%, 99.32%, 100%, and 98.61% on the Dresden, Vision, Forchheim, and Socrates datasets, respectively. Our findings highlight that high-entropy patches, which contain high-frequency information such as edge sharpness, noise, and compression artifacts, are more favorable in improving SCMI accuracy. Code will be made available upon request.

RWKV-UNet: Improving UNet with Long-Range Cooperation for Effective Medical Image Segmentation

In recent years, there have been significant advancements in deep learning for medical image analysis, especially with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and transformer models. However, CNNs face limitations in capturing long-range dependencies while transformers suffer high computational complexities. To address this, we propose RWKV-UNet, a novel model that integrates the RWKV (Receptance Weighted Key Value) structure into the U-Net architecture. This integration enhances the model's ability to capture long-range dependencies and improve contextual understanding, which is crucial for accurate medical image segmentation. We build a strong encoder with developed inverted residual RWKV (IR-RWKV) blocks combining CNNs and RWKVs. We also propose a Cross-Channel Mix (CCM) module to improve skip connections with multi-scale feature fusion, achieving global channel information integration. Experiments on benchmark datasets, including Synapse, ACDC, BUSI, CVC-ClinicDB, CVC-ColonDB, Kvasir-SEG, ISIC 2017 and GLAS show that RWKV-UNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on various types of medical image segmentation. Additionally, smaller variants, RWKV-UNet-S and RWKV-UNet-T, balance accuracy and computational efficiency, making them suitable for broader clinical applications.

EMOv2: Pushing 5M Vision Model Frontier

This work focuses on developing parameter-efficient and lightweight models for dense predictions while trading off parameters, FLOPs, and performance. Our goal is to set up the new frontier of the 5M magnitude lightweight model on various downstream tasks. Inverted Residual Block (IRB) serves as the infrastructure for lightweight CNNs, but no counterparts have been recognized by attention-based design. Our work rethinks the lightweight infrastructure of efficient IRB and practical components in Transformer from a unified perspective, extending CNN-based IRB to attention-based models and abstracting a one-residual Meta Mobile Block (MMBlock) for lightweight model design. Following neat but effective design criterion, we deduce a modern Improved Inverted Residual Mobile Block (i2RMB) and improve a hierarchical Efficient MOdel (EMOv2) with no elaborate complex structures. Considering the imperceptible latency for mobile users when downloading models under 4G/5G bandwidth and ensuring model performance, we investigate the performance upper limit of lightweight models with a magnitude of 5M. Extensive experiments on various vision recognition, dense prediction, and image generation tasks demonstrate the superiority of our EMOv2 over state-of-the-art methods, e.g., EMOv2-1M/2M/5M achieve 72.3, 75.8, and 79.4 Top-1 that surpass equal-order CNN-/Attention-based models significantly. At the same time, EMOv2-5M equipped RetinaNet achieves 41.5 mAP for object detection tasks that surpasses the previous EMO-5M by +2.6. When employing the more robust training recipe, our EMOv2-5M eventually achieves 82.9 Top-1 accuracy, which elevates the performance of 5M magnitude models to a new level. Code is available at https://github.com/zhangzjn/EMOv2.

Image Forgery Localization with State Space Models

Pixel dependency modeling from tampered images is pivotal for image forgery localization. Current approaches predominantly rely on convolutional neural network (CNN) or Transformer-based models, which often either lack sufficient receptive fields or entail significant computational overheads. In this paper, we propose LoMa, a novel image forgery localization method that leverages the Selective State Space (S6) model for global pixel dependency modeling and inverted residual CNN for local pixel dependency modeling. Our method introduces the Mixed-SSM Block, which initially employs atrous selective scan to traverse the spatial domain and convert the tampered image into order patch sequences, and subsequently applies multidirectional S6 modeling. In addition, an auxiliary convolutional branch is introduced to enhance local feature extraction. This design facilitates the efficient extraction of global dependencies while upholding linear complexity. Upon modeling the pixel dependency with the SSM and CNN blocks, the pixel-wise forgery localization results are obtained by a simple MLP decoder. Extensive experimental results validate the superiority of LoMa over CNN-based and Transformer-based state-of-the-arts.

CCi-YOLOv8n: Enhanced Fire Detection with CARAFE and Context-Guided Modules

Fire incidents in urban and forested areas pose serious threats,underscoring the need for more effective detection technologies. To address these challenges, we present CCi-YOLOv8n, an enhanced YOLOv8 model with targeted improvements for detecting small fires and smoke. The model integrates the CARAFE up-sampling operator and a context-guided module to reduce information loss during up-sampling and down-sampling, thereby retaining richer feature representations. Additionally, an inverted residual mobile block enhanced C2f module captures small targets and fine smoke patterns, a critical improvement over the original model's detection capacity.For validation, we introduce Web-Fire, a dataset curated for fire and smoke detection across diverse real-world scenarios. Experimental results indicate that CCi-YOLOv8n outperforms YOLOv8n in detection precision, confirming its effectiveness for robust fire detection tasks.

Can neural operators always be continuously discretized?

We consider the problem of discretization of neural operators between Hilbert spaces in a general framework including skip connections. We focus on bijective neural operators through the lens of diffeomorphisms in infinite dimensions. Framed using category theory, we give a no-go theorem that shows that diffeomorphisms between Hilbert spaces or Hilbert manifolds may not admit any continuous approximations by diffeomorphisms on finite-dimensional spaces, even if the approximations are nonlinear. The natural way out is the introduction of strongly monotone diffeomorphisms and layerwise strongly monotone neural operators which have continuous approximations by strongly monotone diffeomorphisms on finite-dimensional spaces. For these, one can guarantee discretization invariance, while ensuring that finite-dimensional approximations converge not only as sequences of functions, but that their representations converge in a suitable sense as well. Finally, we show that bilipschitz neural operators may always be written in the form of an alternating composition of strongly monotone neural operators, plus a simple isometry. Thus we realize a rigorous platform for discretization of a generalization of a neural operator. We also show that neural operators of this type may be approximated through the composition of finite-rank residual neural operators, where each block is strongly monotone, and may be inverted locally via iteration. We conclude by providing a quantitative approximation result for the discretization of general bilipschitz neural operators.

DRACO-DehazeNet: An Efficient Image Dehazing Network Combining Detail Recovery and a Novel Contrastive Learning Paradigm

Image dehazing is crucial for clarifying images obscured by haze or fog, but current learning-based approaches is dependent on large volumes of training data and hence consumed significant computational power. Additionally, their performance is often inadequate under non-uniform or heavy haze. To address these challenges, we developed the Detail Recovery And Contrastive DehazeNet, which facilitates efficient and effective dehazing via a dense dilated inverted residual block and an attention-based detail recovery network that tailors enhancements to specific dehazed scene contexts. A major innovation is its ability to train effectively with limited data, achieved through a novel quadruplet loss-based contrastive dehazing paradigm. This approach distinctly separates hazy and clear image features while also distinguish lower-quality and higher-quality dehazed images obtained from each sub-modules of our network, thereby refining the dehazing process to a larger extent. Extensive tests on a variety of benchmarked haze datasets demonstrated the superiority of our approach. The code repository for this work will be available soon.

Data-Efficient Low-Complexity Acoustic Scene Classification in the DCASE 2024 Challenge

This article describes the Data-Efficient Low-Complexity Acoustic Scene Classification Task in the DCASE 2024 Challenge and the corresponding baseline system. The task setup is a continuation of previous editions (2022 and 2023), which focused on recording device mismatches and low-complexity constraints. This year's edition introduces an additional real-world problem: participants must develop data-efficient systems for five scenarios, which progressively limit the available training data. The provided baseline system is based on an efficient, factorized CNN architecture constructed from inverted residual blocks and uses Freq-MixStyle to tackle the device mismatch problem. The baseline system's accuracy ranges from 42.40% on the smallest to 56.99% on the largest training set.

Invertible Residual Rescaling Models

Invertible Rescaling Networks (IRNs) and their variants have witnessed remarkable achievements in various image processing tasks like image rescaling. However, we observe that IRNs with deeper networks are difficult to train, thus hindering the representational ability of IRNs. To address this issue, we propose Invertible Residual Rescaling Models (IRRM) for image rescaling by learning a bijection between a high-resolution image and its low-resolution counterpart with a specific distribution. Specifically, we propose IRRM to build a deep network, which contains several Residual Downscaling Modules (RDMs) with long skip connections. Each RDM consists of several Invertible Residual Blocks (IRBs) with short connections. In this way, RDM allows rich low-frequency information to be bypassed by skip connections and forces models to focus on extracting high-frequency information from the image. Extensive experiments show that our IRRM performs significantly better than other state-of-the-art methods with much fewer parameters and complexity. Particularly, our IRRM has respectively PSNR gains of at least 0.3 dB over HCFlow and IRN in the $\times 4$ rescaling while only using 60\% parameters and 50\% FLOPs. The code will be available at https://github.com/THU-Kingmin/IRRM.

PAM-UNet: Shifting Attention on Region of Interest in Medical Images

Computer-aided segmentation methods can assist medical personnel in improving diagnostic outcomes. While recent advancements like UNet and its variants have shown promise, they face a critical challenge: balancing accuracy with computational efficiency. Shallow encoder architectures in UNets often struggle to capture crucial spatial features, leading in inaccurate and sparse segmentation. To address this limitation, we propose a novel \underline{P}rogressive \underline{A}ttention based \underline{M}obile \underline{UNet} (\underline{PAM-UNet}) architecture. The inverted residual (IR) blocks in PAM-UNet help maintain a lightweight framework, while layerwise \textit{Progressive Luong Attention} ($\mathcal{PLA}$) promotes precise segmentation by directing attention toward regions of interest during synthesis. Our approach prioritizes both accuracy and speed, achieving a commendable balance with a mean IoU of 74.65 and a dice score of 82.87, while requiring only 1.32 floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) on the Liver Tumor Segmentation Benchmark (LiTS) 2017 dataset. These results highlight the importance of developing efficient segmentation models to accelerate the adoption of AI in clinical practice.