Estimating the 6D object pose is an essential task in many applications. Due to the lack of depth information, existing RGB-based methods are sensitive to occlusion and illumination changes. How to extract and utilize the geometry features in depth information is crucial to achieve accurate predictions. To this end, we propose TransPose, a novel 6D pose framework that exploits Transformer Encoder with geometry-aware module to develop better learning of point cloud feature representations. Specifically, we first uniformly sample point cloud and extract local geometry features with the designed local feature extractor base on graph convolution network. To improve robustness to occlusion, we adopt Transformer to perform the exchange of global information, making each local feature contains global information. Finally, we introduce geometry-aware module in Transformer Encoder, which to form an effective constrain for point cloud feature learning and makes the global information exchange more tightly coupled with point cloud tasks. Extensive experiments indicate the effectiveness of TransPose, our pose estimation pipeline achieves competitive results on three benchmark datasets.
Recent approaches such as ControlNet offer users fine-grained spatial control over text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models. However, auxiliary modules have to be trained for each type of spatial condition, model architecture, and checkpoint, putting them at odds with the diverse intents and preferences a human designer would like to convey to the AI models during the content creation process. In this work, we present FreeControl, a training-free approach for controllable T2I generation that supports multiple conditions, architectures, and checkpoints simultaneously. FreeControl designs structure guidance to facilitate the structure alignment with a guidance image, and appearance guidance to enable the appearance sharing between images generated using the same seed. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the superior performance of FreeControl across a variety of pre-trained T2I models. In particular, FreeControl facilitates convenient training-free control over many different architectures and checkpoints, allows the challenging input conditions on which most of the existing training-free methods fail, and achieves competitive synthesis quality with training-based approaches.
Whole-slide image (WSI) analysis plays a crucial role in cancer diagnosis and treatment. In addressing the demands of this critical task, self-supervised learning (SSL) methods have emerged as a valuable resource, leveraging their efficiency in circumventing the need for a large number of annotations, which can be both costly and time-consuming to deploy supervised methods. Nevertheless, patch-wise representation may exhibit instability in performance, primarily due to class imbalances stemming from patch selection within WSIs. In this paper, we introduce Nearby Patch Contrastive Learning (NearbyPatchCL), a novel self-supervised learning method that leverages nearby patches as positive samples and a decoupled contrastive loss for robust representation learning. Our method demonstrates a tangible enhancement in performance for downstream tasks involving patch-level multi-class classification. Additionally, we curate a new dataset derived from WSIs sourced from the Canine Cutaneous Cancer Histology, thus establishing a benchmark for the rigorous evaluation of patch-level multi-class classification methodologies. Intensive experiments show that our method significantly outperforms the supervised baseline and state-of-the-art SSL methods with top-1 classification accuracy of 87.56%. Our method also achieves comparable results while utilizing a mere 1% of labeled data, a stark contrast to the 100% labeled data requirement of other approaches. Source code: //github.com/nvtien457/NearbyPatchCL
Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) is a paradigm that leverages unlabeled data for model training. Empirical studies show that SSL can achieve promising performance in distribution shift scenarios, where the downstream and training distributions differ. However, the theoretical understanding of its transferability remains limited. In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework to analyze the transferability of self-supervised contrastive learning, by investigating the impact of data augmentation on it. Our results reveal that the downstream performance of contrastive learning depends largely on the choice of data augmentation. Moreover, we show that contrastive learning fails to learn domain-invariant features, which limits its transferability. Based on these theoretical insights, we propose a novel method called Augmentation-robust Contrastive Learning (ArCL), which guarantees to learn domain-invariant features and can be easily integrated with existing contrastive learning algorithms. We conduct experiments on several datasets and show that ArCL significantly improves the transferability of contrastive learning.
Recently, an audio-visual segmentation (AVS) task has been introduced, aiming to group pixels with sounding objects within a given video. This task necessitates a first-ever audio-driven pixel-level understanding of the scene, posing significant challenges. In this paper, we propose an innovative audio-visual transformer framework, termed COMBO, an acronym for COoperation of Multi-order Bilateral relatiOns. For the first time, our framework explores three types of bilateral entanglements within AVS: pixel entanglement, modality entanglement, and temporal entanglement. Regarding pixel entanglement, we employ a Siam-Encoder Module (SEM) that leverages prior knowledge to generate more precise visual features from the foundational model. For modality entanglement, we design a Bilateral-Fusion Module (BFM), enabling COMBO to align corresponding visual and auditory signals bi-directionally. As for temporal entanglement, we introduce an innovative adaptive inter-frame consistency loss according to the inherent rules of temporal. Comprehensive experiments and ablation studies on AVSBench-object (84.7 mIoU on S4, 59.2 mIou on MS3) and AVSBench-semantic (42.1 mIoU on AVSS) datasets demonstrate that COMBO surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods. Code and more results will be publicly available at //combo-avs.github.io/.
Recently, several methods have been proposed to estimate 3D human pose from multi-view images and achieved impressive performance on public datasets collected in relatively easy scenarios. However, there are limited approaches for extracting 3D human skeletons from multimodal inputs (e.g., RGB and pointcloud) that can enhance the accuracy of predicting 3D poses in challenging situations. We fill this gap by introducing a pipeline called PointVoxel that fuses multi-view RGB and pointcloud inputs to obtain 3D human poses. We demonstrate that volumetric representation is an effective architecture for integrating these different modalities. Moreover, in order to overcome the challenges of annotating 3D human pose labels in difficult scenarios, we develop a synthetic dataset generator for pretraining and design an unsupervised domain adaptation strategy so that we can obtain a well-trained 3D human pose estimator without using any manual annotations. We evaluate our approach on four datasets (two public datasets, one synthetic dataset, and one challenging dataset named BasketBall collected by ourselves), showing promising results. The code and dataset will be released soon.
Monocular 3D human pose estimation (3D-HPE) is an inherently ambiguous task, as a 2D pose in an image might originate from different possible 3D poses. Yet, most 3D-HPE methods rely on regression models, which assume a one-to-one mapping between inputs and outputs. In this work, we provide theoretical and empirical evidence that, because of this ambiguity, common regression models are bound to predict topologically inconsistent poses, and that traditional evaluation metrics, such as the MPJPE, P-MPJPE and PCK, are insufficient to assess this aspect. As a solution, we propose ManiPose, a novel manifold-constrained multi-hypothesis model capable of proposing multiple candidate 3D poses for each 2D input, together with their corresponding plausibility. Unlike previous multi-hypothesis approaches, our solution is completely supervised and does not rely on complex generative models, thus greatly facilitating its training and usage. Furthermore, by constraining our model to lie within the human pose manifold, we can guarantee the consistency of all hypothetical poses predicted with our approach, which was not possible in previous works. We illustrate the usefulness of ManiPose in a synthetic 1D-to-2D lifting setting and demonstrate on real-world datasets that it outperforms state-of-the-art models in pose consistency by a large margin, while still reaching competitive MPJPE performance.
Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3, OPT, and LLaMA have demonstrated remarkable accuracy in a wide range of tasks. However, training these models can incur significant expenses, often requiring tens of thousands of GPUs for months of continuous operation. Typically, this training is carried out in specialized GPU clusters equipped with homogeneous high-speed Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) network interface cards (NICs). The acquisition and maintenance of such dedicated clusters is challenging. Current LLM training frameworks, like Megatron-LM and Megatron-DeepSpeed, focus primarily on optimizing training within homogeneous cluster settings. In this paper, we introduce Holmes, a training framework for LLMs that employs thoughtfully crafted data and model parallelism strategies over the heterogeneous NIC environment. Our primary technical contribution lies in a novel scheduling method that intelligently allocates distinct computational tasklets in LLM training to specific groups of GPU devices based on the characteristics of their connected NICs. Furthermore, our proposed framework, utilizing pipeline parallel techniques, demonstrates scalability to multiple GPU clusters, even in scenarios without high-speed interconnects between nodes in distinct clusters. We conducted comprehensive experiments that involved various scenarios in the heterogeneous NIC environment. In most cases, our framework achieves performance levels close to those achievable with homogeneous RDMA-capable networks (InfiniBand or RoCE), significantly exceeding training efficiency within the pure Ethernet environment. Additionally, we verified that our framework outperforms other mainstream LLM frameworks under heterogeneous NIC environment in terms of training efficiency and can be seamlessly integrated with them.
Domain adaptation of 3D portraits has gained more and more attention. However, the transfer mechanism of existing methods is mainly based on vision or language, which ignores the potential of vision-language combined guidance. In this paper, we propose an Image-Text multi-modal framework, namely Image and Text portrait (ITportrait), for 3D portrait domain adaptation. ITportrait relies on a two-stage alternating training strategy. In the first stage, we employ a 3D Artistic Paired Transfer (APT) method for image-guided style transfer. APT constructs paired photo-realistic portraits to obtain accurate artistic poses, which helps ITportrait to achieve high-quality 3D style transfer. In the second stage, we propose a 3D Image-Text Embedding (ITE) approach in the CLIP space. ITE uses a threshold function to self-adaptively control the optimization direction of images or texts in the CLIP space. Comprehensive experiments prove that our ITportrait achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results and benefits downstream tasks. All source codes and pre-trained models will be released to the public.
Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a vital task in industry advertising systems. Most existing methods focus on the structure design of neural network for better accuracy and suffer from the data sparsity problem. Especially in industry advertising systems, the widely applied negative sample downsampling technique due to resource limitation worsens the problem, resulting in a decline in performance. In this paper, we propose \textbf{A}uxiliary Match \textbf{T}asks for enhancing \textbf{C}lick-\textbf{T}hrough \textbf{R}ate performance (AT4CTR) to alleviate the data sparsity problem. Specifically, we design two match tasks inspired by collaborative filtering to enhance the relevance between user and item. As the "click" action is a strong signal which indicates user's preference towards item directly, we make the first match task aim at pulling closer the representation between user and item regarding the positive samples. Since the user's past click behaviors can also be treated as the user him/herself, we apply the next item prediction as the second match task. For both the match tasks, we choose the InfoNCE in contrastive learning as their loss function. The two match tasks can provide meaningful training signals to speed up the model's convergence and alleviate the data sparsity. We conduct extensive experiments on a public dataset and a large-scale industry advertising dataset. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed auxiliary match tasks. AT4CTR has been deployed in the real industry advertising system and gains remarkable revenue.
A User Next Location Prediction (UNLP) task, which predicts the next location that a user will move to given his/her trajectory, is an indispensable task for a wide range of applications. Previous studies using large-scale trajectory datasets in a single server have achieved remarkable performance in UNLP task. However, in real-world applications, legal and ethical issues have been raised regarding privacy concerns leading to restrictions against sharing human trajectory datasets to any other server. In response, Federated Learning (FL) has emerged to address the personal privacy issue by collaboratively training multiple clients (i.e., users) and then aggregating them. While previous studies employed FL for UNLP, they are still unable to achieve reliable performance because of the heterogeneity of clients' mobility. To tackle this problem, we propose the Federated Learning for Geographic Information (FedGeo), a FL framework specialized for UNLP, which alleviates the heterogeneity of clients' mobility and guarantees personal privacy protection. Firstly, we incorporate prior global geographic adjacency information to the local client model, since the spatial correlation between locations is trained partially in each client who has only a heterogeneous subset of the overall trajectories in FL. We also introduce a novel aggregation method that minimizes the gap between client models to solve the problem of client drift caused by differences between client models when learning with their heterogeneous data. Lastly, we probabilistically exclude clients with extremely heterogeneous data from the FL process by focusing on clients who visit relatively diverse locations. We show that FedGeo is superior to other FL methods for model performance in UNLP task. We also validated our model in a real-world application using our own customers' mobile phones and the FL agent system.