Image Captioning in news report scenario

Image captioning strives to generate pertinent captions for specified images, situating itself at the crossroads of Computer Vision (CV) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). This endeavor is of paramount importance with far-reaching applications in recommendation systems, news outlets, social media, and beyond. Particularly within the realm of news reporting, captions are expected to encompass detailed information, such as the identities of celebrities captured in the images. However, much of the existing body of work primarily centers around understanding scenes and actions. In this paper, we explore the realm of image captioning specifically tailored for celebrity photographs, illustrating its broad potential for enhancing news industry practices. This exploration aims to augment automated news content generation, thereby facilitating a more nuanced dissemination of information. Our endeavor shows a broader horizon, enriching the narrative in news reporting through a more intuitive image captioning framework.

Multi-level Graph Subspace Contrastive Learning for Hyperspectral Image Clustering

Hyperspectral image (HSI) clustering is a challenging task due to its high complexity. Despite subspace clustering shows impressive performance for HSI, traditional methods tend to ignore the global-local interaction in HSI data. In this study, we proposed a multi-level graph subspace contrastive learning (MLGSC) for HSI clustering. The model is divided into the following main parts. Graph convolution subspace construction: utilizing spectral and texture feautures to construct two graph convolution views. Local-global graph representation: local graph representations were obtained by step-by-step convolutions and a more representative global graph representation was obtained using an attention-based pooling strategy. Multi-level graph subspace contrastive learning: multi-level contrastive learning was conducted to obtain local-global joint graph representations, to improve the consistency of the positive samples between views, and to obtain more robust graph embeddings. Specifically, graph-level contrastive learning is used to better learn global representations of HSI data. Node-level intra-view and inter-view contrastive learning is designed to learn joint representations of local regions of HSI. The proposed model is evaluated on four popular HSI datasets: Indian Pines, Pavia University, Houston, and Xu Zhou. The overall accuracies are 97.75%, 99.96%, 92.28%, and 95.73%, which significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art clustering methods.

GauU-Scene V2: Expanse Lidar Image Dataset Shows Unreliable Geometric Reconstruction Using Gaussian Splatting and NeRF

We introduce a novel large-scale scene reconstruction benchmark that utilizes newly developed 3D representation approaches: Gaussian Splatting and Neural Radiance Fields, on our expansive GauU-Scene V2 dataset. GauU-Scene V2 encompasses over 6.5 square kilometers and features a comprehensive RGB dataset coupled with LiDAR ground truth. This dataset offers a unique blend of urban and academic environments for advanced spatial analysis, covering more than 6.5 km2. We also provide detailed supplementary information on data collection protocols. Furthermore, we present an easy-to-follow pipeline to align the COLMAP sparse point cloud with the detailed LiDAR dataset. Our evaluation of U-Scene, which includes a detailed analysis across various novel viewpoints using image-based metrics such as SSIM, LPIPS, and PSNR, shows contradictory results when applying geometric-based metrics, such as Chamfer distance. This leads to doubts about the reliability of current image-based measurement matrices and geometric extraction methods on Gaussian Splatting. We also make the dataset available on the following anonymous project page

Mitigating the Curse of Dimensionality for Certified Robustness via Dual Randomized Smoothing

Randomized Smoothing (RS) has been proven a promising method for endowing an arbitrary image classifier with certified robustness. However, the substantial uncertainty inherent in the high-dimensional isotropic Gaussian noise imposes the curse of dimensionality on RS. Specifically, the upper bound of ${\ell_2}$ certified robustness radius provided by RS exhibits a diminishing trend with the expansion of the input dimension $d$, proportionally decreasing at a rate of $1/\sqrt{d}$. This paper explores the feasibility of providing ${\ell_2}$ certified robustness for high-dimensional input through the utilization of dual smoothing in the lower-dimensional space. The proposed Dual Randomized Smoothing (DRS) down-samples the input image into two sub-images and smooths the two sub-images in lower dimensions. Theoretically, we prove that DRS guarantees a tight ${\ell_2}$ certified robustness radius for the original input and reveal that DRS attains a superior upper bound on the ${\ell_2}$ robustness radius, which decreases proportionally at a rate of $(1/\sqrt m + 1/\sqrt n )$ with $m+n=d$. Extensive experiments demonstrate the generalizability and effectiveness of DRS, which exhibits a notable capability to integrate with established methodologies, yielding substantial improvements in both accuracy and ${\ell_2}$ certified robustness baselines of RS on the CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/xiasong0501/DRS.

AdaBM: On-the-Fly Adaptive Bit Mapping for Image Super-Resolution

Although image super-resolution (SR) problem has experienced unprecedented restoration accuracy with deep neural networks, it has yet limited versatile applications due to the substantial computational costs. Since different input images for SR face different restoration difficulties, adapting computational costs based on the input image, referred to as adaptive inference, has emerged as a promising solution to compress SR networks. Specifically, adapting the quantization bit-widths has successfully reduced the inference and memory cost without sacrificing the accuracy. However, despite the benefits of the resultant adaptive network, existing works rely on time-intensive quantization-aware training with full access to the original training pairs to learn the appropriate bit allocation policies, which limits its ubiquitous usage. To this end, we introduce the first on-the-fly adaptive quantization framework that accelerates the processing time from hours to seconds. We formulate the bit allocation problem with only two bit mapping modules: one to map the input image to the image-wise bit adaptation factor and one to obtain the layer-wise adaptation factors. These bit mappings are calibrated and fine-tuned using only a small number of calibration images. We achieve competitive performance with the previous adaptive quantization methods, while the processing time is accelerated by x2000. Codes are available at https://github.com/Cheeun/AdaBM.

Power-Efficient Image Storage: Leveraging Super Resolution Generative Adversarial Network for Sustainable Compression and Reduced Carbon Footprint

In recent years, large-scale adoption of cloud storage solutions has revolutionized the way we think about digital data storage. However, the exponential increase in data volume, especially images, has raised environmental concerns regarding power and resource consumption, as well as the rising digital carbon footprint emissions. The aim of this research is to propose a methodology for cloud-based image storage by integrating image compression technology with SuperResolution Generative Adversarial Networks (SRGAN). Rather than storing images in their original format directly on the cloud, our approach involves initially reducing the image size through compression and downsizing techniques before storage. Upon request, these compressed images will be retrieved and processed by SRGAN to generate images. The efficacy of the proposed method is evaluated in terms of PSNR and SSIM metrics. Additionally, a mathematical analysis is given to calculate power consumption and carbon footprint assesment. The proposed data compression technique provides a significant solution to achieve a reasonable trade off between environmental sustainability and industrial efficiency.

Harnessing the Power of Large Vision Language Models for Synthetic Image Detection

In recent years, the emergence of models capable of generating images from text has attracted considerable interest, offering the possibility of creating realistic images from text descriptions. Yet these advances have also raised concerns about the potential misuse of these images, including the creation of misleading content such as fake news and propaganda. This study investigates the effectiveness of using advanced vision-language models (VLMs) for synthetic image identification. Specifically, the focus is on tuning state-of-the-art image captioning models for synthetic image detection. By harnessing the robust understanding capabilities of large VLMs, the aim is to distinguish authentic images from synthetic images produced by diffusion-based models. This study contributes to the advancement of synthetic image detection by exploiting the capabilities of visual language models such as BLIP-2 and ViTGPT2. By tailoring image captioning models, we address the challenges associated with the potential misuse of synthetic images in real-world applications. Results described in this paper highlight the promising role of VLMs in the field of synthetic image detection, outperforming conventional image-based detection techniques. Code and models can be found at https://github.com/Mamadou-Keita/VLM-DETECT.

On Speculative Decoding for Multimodal Large Language Models

Inference with Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is slow due to their large-language-model backbone which suffers from memory bandwidth bottleneck and generates tokens auto-regressively. In this paper, we explore the application of speculative decoding to enhance the inference efficiency of MLLMs, specifically the LLaVA 7B model. We show that a language-only model can serve as a good draft model for speculative decoding with LLaVA 7B, bypassing the need for image tokens and their associated processing components from the draft model. Our experiments across three different tasks show that speculative decoding can achieve a memory-bound speedup of up to 2.37$\times$ using a 115M parameter language model that we trained from scratch. Additionally, we introduce a compact LLaVA draft model incorporating an image adapter, which shows marginal performance gains in image captioning while maintaining comparable results in other tasks.

DiffOp-net: A Differential Operator-based Fully Convolutional Network for Unsupervised Deformable Image Registration

Existing unsupervised deformable image registration methods usually rely on metrics applied to the gradients of predicted displacement or velocity fields as a regularization term to ensure transformation smoothness, which potentially limits registration accuracy. In this study, we propose a novel approach to enhance unsupervised deformable image registration by introducing a new differential operator into the registration framework. This operator, acting on the velocity field and mapping it to a dual space, ensures the smoothness of the velocity field during optimization, facilitating accurate deformable registration. In addition, to tackle the challenge of capturing large deformations inside image pairs, we introduce a Cross-Coordinate Attention module (CCA) and embed it into a proposed Fully Convolutional Networks (FCNs)-based multi-resolution registration architecture. Evaluation experiments are conducted on two magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) datasets. Compared to various state-of-the-art registration approaches, including a traditional algorithm and three representative unsupervised learning-based methods, our method achieves superior accuracies, maintaining desirable diffeomorphic properties, and exhibiting promising registration speed.

RefQSR: Reference-based Quantization for Image Super-Resolution Networks

Single image super-resolution (SISR) aims to reconstruct a high-resolution image from its low-resolution observation. Recent deep learning-based SISR models show high performance at the expense of increased computational costs, limiting their use in resource-constrained environments. As a promising solution for computationally efficient network design, network quantization has been extensively studied. However, existing quantization methods developed for SISR have yet to effectively exploit image self-similarity, which is a new direction for exploration in this study. We introduce a novel method called reference-based quantization for image super-resolution (RefQSR) that applies high-bit quantization to several representative patches and uses them as references for low-bit quantization of the rest of the patches in an image. To this end, we design dedicated patch clustering and reference-based quantization modules and integrate them into existing SISR network quantization methods. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of RefQSR on various SISR networks and quantization methods.