JPEG is a widely used compression scheme to efficiently reduce the volume of transmitted images. The artifacts appear among blocks due to the information loss, which not only affects the quality of images but also harms the subsequent high-level tasks in terms of feature drifting. High-level vision models trained on high-quality images will suffer performance degradation when dealing with compressed images, especially on mobile devices. Numerous learning-based JPEG artifact removal methods have been proposed to handle visual artifacts. However, it is not an ideal choice to use these JPEG artifact removal methods as a pre-processing for compressed image classification for the following reasons: 1. These methods are designed for human vision rather than high-level vision models; 2. These methods are not efficient enough to serve as pre-processing on resource-constrained devices. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel lightweight AFD module to boost the performance of pre-trained image classification models when facing compressed images. First, a FDE-Net is devised to generate the spatial-wise FDM in the DCT domain. Next, the estimated FDM is transmitted to the FE-Net to generate the mapping relationship between degraded features and corresponding high-quality features. A simple but effective RepConv block equipped with structural re-parameterization is utilized in FE-Net, which enriches feature representation in the training phase while maintaining efficiency in the deployment phase. After training on limited compressed images, the AFD-Module can serve as a "plug-and-play" model for pre-trained classification models to improve their performance on compressed images. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed AFD module can comprehensively improve the accuracy of the pre-trained classification models and significantly outperform the existing methods.
Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) are graphs of connected textual documents. Graph models can efficiently learn TAGs, but their training heavily relies on human-annotated labels, which are scarce or even unavailable in many applications. Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities in few-shot and zero-shot TAG learning, but they suffer from scalability, cost, and privacy issues. Therefore, in this work, we focus on synergizing LLMs and graph models with their complementary strengths by distilling the power of LLMs to a local graph model on TAG learning. To address the inherent gaps between LLMs (generative models for texts) and graph models (discriminative models for graphs), we propose first to let LLMs teach an interpreter with rich textual rationale and then let a student model mimic the interpreter's reasoning without LLMs' textual rationale. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of our proposed framework.
Contextualized embeddings are the preferred tool for modeling Lexical Semantic Change (LSC). Current evaluations typically focus on a specific task known as Graded Change Detection (GCD). However, performance comparison across work are often misleading due to their reliance on diverse settings. In this paper, we evaluate state-of-the-art models and approaches for GCD under equal conditions. We further break the LSC problem into Word-in-Context (WiC) and Word Sense Induction (WSI) tasks, and compare models across these different levels. Our evaluation is performed across different languages on eight available benchmarks for LSC, and shows that (i) APD outperforms other approaches for GCD; (ii) XL-LEXEME outperforms other contextualized models for WiC, WSI, and GCD, while being comparable to GPT-4; (iii) there is a clear need for improving the modeling of word meanings, as well as focus on how, when, and why these meanings change, rather than solely focusing on the extent of semantic change.
Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models, when fine-tuned on a few personal images, are able to generate visuals with a high degree of consistency. However, they still lack in synthesizing images of different scenarios or styles that are possible in the original pretrained models. To address this, we propose to fine-tune the T2I model by maximizing consistency to reference images, while penalizing the deviation from the pretrained model. We devise a novel training objective for T2I diffusion models that minimally fine-tunes the pretrained model to achieve consistency. Our method, dubbed \emph{Direct Consistency Optimization}, is as simple as regular diffusion loss, while significantly enhancing the compositionality of personalized T2I models. Also, our approach induces a new sampling method that controls the tradeoff between image fidelity and prompt fidelity. Lastly, we emphasize the necessity of using a comprehensive caption for reference images to further enhance the image-text alignment. We show the efficacy of the proposed method on the T2I personalization for subject, style, or both. In particular, our method results in a superior Pareto frontier to the baselines. Generated examples and codes are in our project page( //dco-t2i.github.io/).
Empathetic response generation is increasingly significant in AI, necessitating nuanced emotional and cognitive understanding coupled with articulate response expression. Current large language models (LLMs) excel in response expression; however, they lack the ability to deeply understand emotional and cognitive nuances, particularly in pinpointing fine-grained emotions and their triggers. Conversely, small-scale empathetic models (SEMs) offer strength in fine-grained emotion detection and detailed emotion cause identification. To harness the complementary strengths of both LLMs and SEMs, we introduce a Hybrid Empathetic Framework (HEF). HEF regards SEMs as flexible plugins to improve LLM's nuanced emotional and cognitive understanding. Regarding emotional understanding, HEF implements a two-stage emotion prediction strategy, encouraging LLMs to prioritize primary emotions emphasized by SEMs, followed by other categories, substantially alleviates the difficulties for LLMs in fine-grained emotion detection. Regarding cognitive understanding, HEF employs an emotion cause perception strategy, prompting LLMs to focus on crucial emotion-eliciting words identified by SEMs, thus boosting LLMs' capabilities in identifying emotion causes. This collaborative approach enables LLMs to discern emotions more precisely and formulate empathetic responses. We validate HEF on the Empathetic-Dialogue dataset, and the findings indicate that our framework enhances the refined understanding of LLMs and their ability to convey empathetic responses.
The Geometry-based Point Cloud Compression (G-PCC) has been developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group to compress point clouds. In its lossy mode, the reconstructed point cloud by G-PCC often suffers from noticeable distortions due to the na\"{i}ve geometry quantization (i.e., grid downsampling). This paper proposes a hierarchical prior-based super resolution method for point cloud geometry compression. The content-dependent hierarchical prior is constructed at the encoder side, which enables coarse-to-fine super resolution of the point cloud geometry at the decoder side. A more accurate prior generally yields improved reconstruction performance, at the cost of increased bits required to encode this side information. With a proper balance between prior accuracy and bit consumption, the proposed method demonstrates substantial Bjontegaard-delta bitrate savings on the MPEG Cat1A dataset, surpassing the octree-based and trisoup-based G-PCC v14. We provide our implementations for reproducible research at //github.com/lidq92/mpeg-pcc-tmc13.
Typographic Attacks, which involve pasting misleading text onto an image, were noted to harm the performance of Vision-Language Models like CLIP. However, the susceptibility of recent Large Vision-Language Models to these attacks remains understudied. Furthermore, prior work's Typographic attacks against CLIP randomly sample a misleading class from a predefined set of categories. However, this simple strategy misses more effective attacks that exploit LVLM(s) stronger language skills. To address these issues, we first introduce a benchmark for testing Typographic attacks against LVLM(s). Moreover, we introduce two novel and more effective \textit{Self-Generated} attacks which prompt the LVLM to generate an attack against itself: 1) Class Based Attack where the LVLM (e.g. LLaVA) is asked which deceiving class is most similar to the target class and 2) Descriptive Attacks where a more advanced LVLM (e.g. GPT4-V) is asked to recommend a Typographic attack that includes both a deceiving class and description. Using our benchmark, we uncover that Self-Generated attacks pose a significant threat, reducing LVLM(s) classification performance by up to 33\%. We also uncover that attacks generated by one model (e.g. GPT-4V or LLaVA) are effective against the model itself and other models like InstructBLIP and MiniGPT4. Code: \url{//github.com/mqraitem/Self-Gen-Typo-Attack}
Answering questions that require reading texts in an image is challenging for current models. One key difficulty of this task is that rare, polysemous, and ambiguous words frequently appear in images, e.g., names of places, products, and sports teams. To overcome this difficulty, only resorting to pre-trained word embedding models is far from enough. A desired model should utilize the rich information in multiple modalities of the image to help understand the meaning of scene texts, e.g., the prominent text on a bottle is most likely to be the brand. Following this idea, we propose a novel VQA approach, Multi-Modal Graph Neural Network (MM-GNN). It first represents an image as a graph consisting of three sub-graphs, depicting visual, semantic, and numeric modalities respectively. Then, we introduce three aggregators which guide the message passing from one graph to another to utilize the contexts in various modalities, so as to refine the features of nodes. The updated nodes have better features for the downstream question answering module. Experimental evaluations show that our MM-GNN represents the scene texts better and obviously facilitates the performances on two VQA tasks that require reading scene texts.
Video captioning is a challenging task that requires a deep understanding of visual scenes. State-of-the-art methods generate captions using either scene-level or object-level information but without explicitly modeling object interactions. Thus, they often fail to make visually grounded predictions, and are sensitive to spurious correlations. In this paper, we propose a novel spatio-temporal graph model for video captioning that exploits object interactions in space and time. Our model builds interpretable links and is able to provide explicit visual grounding. To avoid unstable performance caused by the variable number of objects, we further propose an object-aware knowledge distillation mechanism, in which local object information is used to regularize global scene features. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through extensive experiments on two benchmarks, showing our approach yields competitive performance with interpretable predictions.
We investigate the problem of automatically determining what type of shoe left an impression found at a crime scene. This recognition problem is made difficult by the variability in types of crime scene evidence (ranging from traces of dust or oil on hard surfaces to impressions made in soil) and the lack of comprehensive databases of shoe outsole tread patterns. We find that mid-level features extracted by pre-trained convolutional neural nets are surprisingly effective descriptors for this specialized domains. However, the choice of similarity measure for matching exemplars to a query image is essential to good performance. For matching multi-channel deep features, we propose the use of multi-channel normalized cross-correlation and analyze its effectiveness. Our proposed metric significantly improves performance in matching crime scene shoeprints to laboratory test impressions. We also show its effectiveness in other cross-domain image retrieval problems: matching facade images to segmentation labels and aerial photos to map images. Finally, we introduce a discriminatively trained variant and fine-tune our system through our proposed metric, obtaining state-of-the-art performance.
Automatically creating the description of an image using any natural languages sentence like English is a very challenging task. It requires expertise of both image processing as well as natural language processing. This paper discuss about different available models for image captioning task. We have also discussed about how the advancement in the task of object recognition and machine translation has greatly improved the performance of image captioning model in recent years. In addition to that we have discussed how this model can be implemented. In the end, we have also evaluated the performance of model using standard evaluation matrices.