ARIN: Adaptive Resampling and Instance Normalization for Robust Blind Inpainting of Dunhuang Cave Paintings

Image enhancement algorithms are very useful for real world computer vision tasks where image resolution is often physically limited by the sensor size. While state-of-the-art deep neural networks show impressive results for image enhancement, they often struggle to enhance real-world images. In this work, we tackle a real-world setting: inpainting of images from Dunhuang caves. The Dunhuang dataset consists of murals, half of which suffer from corrosion and aging. These murals feature a range of rich content, such as Buddha statues, bodhisattvas, sponsors, architecture, dance, music, and decorative patterns designed by different artists spanning ten centuries, which makes manual restoration challenging. We modify two different existing methods (CAR, HINet) that are based upon state-of-the-art (SOTA) super resolution and deblurring networks. We show that those can successfully inpaint and enhance these deteriorated cave paintings. We further show that a novel combination of CAR and HINet, resulting in our proposed inpainting network (ARIN), is very robust to external noise, especially Gaussian noise. To this end, we present a quantitative and qualitative comparison of our proposed approach with existing SOTA networks and winners of the Dunhuang challenge. One of the proposed methods HINet) represents the new state of the art and outperforms the 1st place of the Dunhuang Challenge, while our combination ARIN, which is robust to noise, is comparable to the 1st place. We also present and discuss qualitative results showing the impact of our method for inpainting on Dunhuang cave images.

Compact and De-biased Negative Instance Embedding for Multi-Instance Learning on Whole-Slide Image Classification

Whole-slide image (WSI) classification is a challenging task because 1) patches from WSI lack annotation, and 2) WSI possesses unnecessary variability, e.g., stain protocol. Recently, Multiple-Instance Learning (MIL) has made significant progress, allowing for classification based on slide-level, rather than patch-level, annotations. However, existing MIL methods ignore that all patches from normal slides are normal. Using this free annotation, we introduce a semi-supervision signal to de-bias the inter-slide variability and to capture the common factors of variation within normal patches. Because our method is orthogonal to the MIL algorithm, we evaluate our method on top of the recently proposed MIL algorithms and also compare the performance with other semi-supervised approaches. We evaluate our method on two public WSI datasets including Camelyon-16 and TCGA lung cancer and demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the predictive performance of existing MIL algorithms and outperforms other semi-supervised algorithms. We release our code at https://github.com/AITRICS/pathology_mil.

MOSAIC: A Modular System for Assistive and Interactive Cooking

We present MOSAIC, a modular architecture for home robots to perform complex collaborative tasks, such as cooking with everyday users. MOSAIC tightly collaborates with humans, interacts with users using natural language, coordinates multiple robots, and manages an open vocabulary of everyday objects. At its core, MOSAIC employs modularity: it leverages multiple large-scale pre-trained models for general tasks like language and image recognition, while using streamlined modules designed for task-specific control. We extensively evaluate MOSAIC on 60 end-to-end trials where two robots collaborate with a human user to cook a combination of 6 recipes. We also extensively test individual modules with 180 episodes of visuomotor picking, 60 episodes of human motion forecasting, and 46 online user evaluations of the task planner. We show that MOSAIC is able to efficiently collaborate with humans by running the overall system end-to-end with a real human user, completing 68.3% (41/60) collaborative cooking trials of 6 different recipes with a subtask completion rate of 91.6%. Finally, we discuss the limitations of the current system and exciting open challenges in this domain. The project's website is at https://portal-cornell.github.io/MOSAIC/

A Novel Approach to Industrial Defect Generation through Blended Latent Diffusion Model with Online Adaptation

Effectively addressing the challenge of industrial Anomaly Detection (AD) necessitates an ample supply of defective samples, a constraint often hindered by their scarcity in industrial contexts. This paper introduces a novel algorithm designed to augment defective samples, thereby enhancing AD performance. The proposed method tailors the blended latent diffusion model for defect sample generation, employing a diffusion model to generate defective samples in the latent space. A feature editing process, controlled by a "trimap" mask and text prompts, refines the generated samples. The image generation inference process is structured into three stages: a free diffusion stage, an editing diffusion stage, and an online decoder adaptation stage. This sophisticated inference strategy yields high-quality synthetic defective samples with diverse pattern variations, leading to significantly improved AD accuracies based on the augmented training set. Specifically, on the widely recognized MVTec AD dataset, the proposed method elevates the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance of AD with augmented data by 1.5%, 1.9%, and 3.1% for AD metrics AP, IAP, and IAP90, respectively. The implementation code of this work can be found at the GitHub repository https://github.com/GrandpaXun242/AdaBLDM.git

The All-Seeing Project V2: Towards General Relation Comprehension of the Open World

We present the All-Seeing Project V2: a new model and dataset designed for understanding object relations in images. Specifically, we propose the All-Seeing Model V2 (ASMv2) that integrates the formulation of text generation, object localization, and relation comprehension into a relation conversation (ReC) task. Leveraging this unified task, our model excels not only in perceiving and recognizing all objects within the image but also in grasping the intricate relation graph between them, diminishing the relation hallucination often encountered by Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs). To facilitate training and evaluation of MLLMs in relation understanding, we created the first high-quality ReC dataset ({AS-V2) which is aligned with the format of standard instruction tuning data. In addition, we design a new benchmark, termed Circular-based Relation Probing Evaluation (CRPE) for comprehensively evaluating the relation comprehension capabilities of MLLMs. Notably, our ASMv2 achieves an overall accuracy of 52.04 on this relation-aware benchmark, surpassing the 43.14 of LLaVA-1.5 by a large margin. We hope that our work can inspire more future research and contribute to the evolution towards artificial general intelligence. Our project is released at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/all-seeing.

Learning a Generalized Physical Face Model From Data

Physically-based simulation is a powerful approach for 3D facial animation as the resulting deformations are governed by physical constraints, allowing to easily resolve self-collisions, respond to external forces and perform realistic anatomy edits. Today's methods are data-driven, where the actuations for finite elements are inferred from captured skin geometry. Unfortunately, these approaches have not been widely adopted due to the complexity of initializing the material space and learning the deformation model for each character separately, which often requires a skilled artist followed by lengthy network training. In this work, we aim to make physics-based facial animation more accessible by proposing a generalized physical face model that we learn from a large 3D face dataset in a simulation-free manner. Once trained, our model can be quickly fit to any unseen identity and produce a ready-to-animate physical face model automatically. Fitting is as easy as providing a single 3D face scan, or even a single face image. After fitting, we offer intuitive animation controls, as well as the ability to retarget animations across characters. All the while, the resulting animations allow for physical effects like collision avoidance, gravity, paralysis, bone reshaping and more.

VideoMAC: Video Masked Autoencoders Meet ConvNets

Recently, the advancement of self-supervised learning techniques, like masked autoencoders (MAE), has greatly influenced visual representation learning for images and videos. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that the predominant approaches in existing masked image / video modeling rely excessively on resource-intensive vision transformers (ViTs) as the feature encoder. In this paper, we propose a new approach termed as \textbf{VideoMAC}, which combines video masked autoencoders with resource-friendly ConvNets. Specifically, VideoMAC employs symmetric masking on randomly sampled pairs of video frames. To prevent the issue of mask pattern dissipation, we utilize ConvNets which are implemented with sparse convolutional operators as encoders. Simultaneously, we present a simple yet effective masked video modeling (MVM) approach, a dual encoder architecture comprising an online encoder and an exponential moving average target encoder, aimed to facilitate inter-frame reconstruction consistency in videos. Additionally, we demonstrate that VideoMAC, empowering classical (ResNet) / modern (ConvNeXt) convolutional encoders to harness the benefits of MVM, outperforms ViT-based approaches on downstream tasks, including video object segmentation (+\textbf{5.2\%} / \textbf{6.4\%} $\mathcal{J}\&\mathcal{F}$), body part propagation (+\textbf{6.3\%} / \textbf{3.1\%} mIoU), and human pose tracking (+\textbf{10.2\%} / \textbf{11.1\%} PCK@0.1).

MIKO: Multimodal Intention Knowledge Distillation from Large Language Models for Social-Media Commonsense Discovery

Social media has become a ubiquitous tool for connecting with others, staying updated with news, expressing opinions, and finding entertainment. However, understanding the intention behind social media posts remains challenging due to the implicitness of intentions in social media posts, the need for cross-modality understanding of both text and images, and the presence of noisy information such as hashtags, misspelled words, and complicated abbreviations. To address these challenges, we present MIKO, a Multimodal Intention Kowledge DistillatiOn framework that collaboratively leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) and a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to uncover users' intentions. Specifically, we use an MLLM to interpret the image and an LLM to extract key information from the text and finally instruct the LLM again to generate intentions. By applying MIKO to publicly available social media datasets, we construct an intention knowledge base featuring 1,372K intentions rooted in 137,287 posts. We conduct a two-stage annotation to verify the quality of the generated knowledge and benchmark the performance of widely used LLMs for intention generation. We further apply MIKO to a sarcasm detection dataset and distill a student model to demonstrate the downstream benefits of applying intention knowledge.

Compressed image quality assessment using stacking

It is well-known that there is no universal metric for image quality evaluation. In this case, distortion-specific metrics can be more reliable. The artifact imposed by image compression can be considered as a combination of various distortions. Depending on the image context, this combination can be different. As a result, Generalization can be regarded as the major challenge in compressed image quality assessment. In this approach, stacking is employed to provide a reliable method. Both semantic and low-level information are employed in the presented IQA to predict the human visual system. Moreover, the results of the Full-Reference (FR) and No-Reference (NR) models are aggregated to improve the proposed Full-Reference method for compressed image quality evaluation. The accuracy of the quality benchmark of the clic2024 perceptual image challenge was achieved 79.6\%, which illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed fusion-based approach.

SDXL-Lightning: Progressive Adversarial Diffusion Distillation

We propose a diffusion distillation method that achieves new state-of-the-art in one-step/few-step 1024px text-to-image generation based on SDXL. Our method combines progressive and adversarial distillation to achieve a balance between quality and mode coverage. In this paper, we discuss the theoretical analysis, discriminator design, model formulation, and training techniques. We open-source our distilled SDXL-Lightning models both as LoRA and full UNet weights.