Audio-visual segmentation (AVS) is a complex task that involves accurately segmenting the corresponding sounding object based on audio-visual queries. Successful audio-visual learning requires two essential components: 1) an unbiased dataset with high-quality pixel-level multi-class labels, and 2) a model capable of effectively linking audio information with its corresponding visual object. However, these two requirements are only partially addressed by current methods, with training sets containing biased audio-visual data, and models that generalise poorly beyond this biased training set. In this work, we propose a new strategy to build cost-effective and relatively unbiased audio-visual semantic segmentation benchmarks. Our strategy, called Visual Post-production (VPO), explores the observation that it is not necessary to have explicit audio-visual pairs extracted from single video sources to build such benchmarks. We also refine the previously proposed AVSBench to transform it into the audio-visual semantic segmentation benchmark AVSBench-Single+. Furthermore, this paper introduces a new pixel-wise audio-visual contrastive learning method to enable a better generalisation of the model beyond the training set. We verify the validity of the VPO strategy by showing that state-of-the-art (SOTA) models trained with datasets built by matching audio and visual data from different sources or with datasets containing audio and visual data from the same video source produce almost the same accuracy. Then, using the proposed VPO benchmarks and AVSBench-Single+, we show that our method produces more accurate audio-visual semantic segmentation than SOTA models. Code and dataset will be available.
We introduce a new task -- language-driven video inpainting, which uses natural language instructions to guide the inpainting process. This approach overcomes the limitations of traditional video inpainting methods that depend on manually labeled binary masks, a process often tedious and labor-intensive. We present the Remove Objects from Videos by Instructions (ROVI) dataset, containing 5,650 videos and 9,091 inpainting results, to support training and evaluation for this task. We also propose a novel diffusion-based language-driven video inpainting framework, the first end-to-end baseline for this task, integrating Multimodal Large Language Models to understand and execute complex language-based inpainting requests effectively. Our comprehensive results showcase the dataset's versatility and the model's effectiveness in various language-instructed inpainting scenarios. We will make datasets, code, and models publicly available.
The problem of identifying the channel with the highest capacity among several discrete memoryless channels (DMCs) is considered. The problem is cast as a pure-exploration multi-armed bandit problem, which follows the practical use of training sequences to sense the communication channel statistics. A capacity estimator is proposed and tight confidence bounds on the estimator error are derived. Based on this capacity estimator, a gap-elimination algorithm termed BestChanID is proposed, which is oblivious to the capacity-achieving input distribution and is guaranteed to output the DMC with the largest capacity, with a desired confidence. Furthermore, two additional algorithms NaiveChanSel and MedianChanEl, that output with certain confidence a DMC with capacity close to the maximal, are introduced. Each of those algorithms is beneficial in a different regime and can be used as a subroutine in BestChanID. The sample complexity of all algorithms is analyzed as a function of the desired confidence parameter, the number of channels, and the channels' input and output alphabet sizes. The cost of best channel identification is shown to scale quadratically with the alphabet size, and a fundamental lower bound for the required number of channel senses to identify the best channel with a certain confidence is derived.
Audio signal segmentation is a key task for automatic audio indexing. It consists of detecting the boundaries of class-homogeneous segments in the signal. In many applications, explainable AI is a vital process for transparency of decision-making with machine learning. In this paper, we propose an explainable multilabel segmentation model that solves speech activity (SAD), music (MD), noise (ND), and overlapped speech detection (OSD) simultaneously. This proxy uses the non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) to map the embedding used for the segmentation to the frequency domain. Experiments conducted on two datasets show similar performances as the pre-trained black box model while showing strong explainability features. Specifically, the frequency bins used for the decision can be easily identified at both the segment level (local explanations) and global level (class prototypes).
Online unsupervised video object segmentation (UVOS) uses the previous frames as its input to automatically separate the primary object(s) from a streaming video without using any further manual annotation. A major challenge is that the model has no access to the future and must rely solely on the history, i.e., the segmentation mask is predicted from the current frame as soon as it is captured. In this work, a novel contrastive motion clustering algorithm with an optical flow as its input is proposed for the online UVOS by exploiting the common fate principle that visual elements tend to be perceived as a group if they possess the same motion pattern. We build a simple and effective auto-encoder to iteratively summarize non-learnable prototypical bases for the motion pattern, while the bases in turn help learn the representation of the embedding network. Further, a contrastive learning strategy based on a boundary prior is developed to improve foreground and background feature discrimination in the representation learning stage. The proposed algorithm can be optimized on arbitrarily-scale data i.e., frame, clip, dataset) and performed in an online fashion. Experiments on $\textit{DAVIS}_{\textit{16}}$, $\textit{FBMS}$, and $\textit{SegTrackV2}$ datasets show that the accuracy of our method surpasses the previous state-of-the-art (SoTA) online UVOS method by a margin of 0.8%, 2.9%, and 1.1%, respectively. Furthermore, by using an online deep subspace clustering to tackle the motion grouping, our method is able to achieve higher accuracy at $3\times$ faster inference time compared to SoTA online UVOS method, and making a good trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency. Our code is available at //github.com/xilin1991/ClusterNet.
Semantic segmentation in complex scenes relies not only on object appearance but also on object location and the surrounding environment. Nonetheless, it is difficult to model long-range context in the format of pairwise point correlations due to the huge computational cost for large-scale point clouds. In this paper, we propose using regions as the intermediate representation of point clouds instead of fine-grained points or voxels to reduce the computational burden. We introduce a novel Region-Enhanced Feature Learning Network (REFL-Net) that leverages region correlations to enhance point feature learning. We design a region-based feature enhancement (RFE) module, which consists of a Semantic-Spatial Region Extraction stage and a Region Dependency Modeling stage. In the first stage, the input points are grouped into a set of regions based on their semantic and spatial proximity. In the second stage, we explore inter-region semantic and spatial relationships by employing a self-attention block on region features and then fuse point features with the region features to obtain more discriminative representations. Our proposed RFE module is plug-and-play and can be integrated with common semantic segmentation backbones. We conduct extensive experiments on ScanNetV2 and S3DIS datasets and evaluate our RFE module with different segmentation backbones. Our REFL-Net achieves 1.8% mIoU gain on ScanNetV2 and 1.7% mIoU gain on S3DIS with negligible computational cost compared with backbone models. Both quantitative and qualitative results show the powerful long-range context modeling ability and strong generalization ability of our REFL-Net.
The referring video object segmentation task (RVOS) involves segmentation of a text-referred object instance in the frames of a given video. Due to the complex nature of this multimodal task, which combines text reasoning, video understanding, instance segmentation and tracking, existing approaches typically rely on sophisticated pipelines in order to tackle it. In this paper, we propose a simple Transformer-based approach to RVOS. Our framework, termed Multimodal Tracking Transformer (MTTR), models the RVOS task as a sequence prediction problem. Following recent advancements in computer vision and natural language processing, MTTR is based on the realization that video and text can both be processed together effectively and elegantly by a single multimodal Transformer model. MTTR is end-to-end trainable, free of text-related inductive bias components and requires no additional mask-refinement post-processing steps. As such, it simplifies the RVOS pipeline considerably compared to existing methods. Evaluation on standard benchmarks reveals that MTTR significantly outperforms previous art across multiple metrics. In particular, MTTR shows impressive +5.7 and +5.0 mAP gains on the A2D-Sentences and JHMDB-Sentences datasets respectively, while processing 76 frames per second. In addition, we report strong results on the public validation set of Refer-YouTube-VOS, a more challenging RVOS dataset that has yet to receive the attention of researchers. The code to reproduce our experiments is available at //github.com/mttr2021/MTTR
Few-shot Knowledge Graph (KG) completion is a focus of current research, where each task aims at querying unseen facts of a relation given its few-shot reference entity pairs. Recent attempts solve this problem by learning static representations of entities and references, ignoring their dynamic properties, i.e., entities may exhibit diverse roles within task relations, and references may make different contributions to queries. This work proposes an adaptive attentional network for few-shot KG completion by learning adaptive entity and reference representations. Specifically, entities are modeled by an adaptive neighbor encoder to discern their task-oriented roles, while references are modeled by an adaptive query-aware aggregator to differentiate their contributions. Through the attention mechanism, both entities and references can capture their fine-grained semantic meanings, and thus render more expressive representations. This will be more predictive for knowledge acquisition in the few-shot scenario. Evaluation in link prediction on two public datasets shows that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results with different few-shot sizes.
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.
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown dramatic improvements in single image super-resolution (SISR) by using large-scale external samples. Despite their remarkable performance based on the external dataset, they cannot exploit internal information within a specific image. Another problem is that they are applicable only to the specific condition of data that they are supervised. For instance, the low-resolution (LR) image should be a "bicubic" downsampled noise-free image from a high-resolution (HR) one. To address both issues, zero-shot super-resolution (ZSSR) has been proposed for flexible internal learning. However, they require thousands of gradient updates, i.e., long inference time. In this paper, we present Meta-Transfer Learning for Zero-Shot Super-Resolution (MZSR), which leverages ZSSR. Precisely, it is based on finding a generic initial parameter that is suitable for internal learning. Thus, we can exploit both external and internal information, where one single gradient update can yield quite considerable results. (See Figure 1). With our method, the network can quickly adapt to a given image condition. In this respect, our method can be applied to a large spectrum of image conditions within a fast adaptation process.
Image-to-image translation aims to learn the mapping between two visual domains. There are two main challenges for many applications: 1) the lack of aligned training pairs and 2) multiple possible outputs from a single input image. In this work, we present an approach based on disentangled representation for producing diverse outputs without paired training images. To achieve diversity, we propose to embed images onto two spaces: a domain-invariant content space capturing shared information across domains and a domain-specific attribute space. Our model takes the encoded content features extracted from a given input and the attribute vectors sampled from the attribute space to produce diverse outputs at test time. To handle unpaired training data, we introduce a novel cross-cycle consistency loss based on disentangled representations. Qualitative results show that our model can generate diverse and realistic images on a wide range of tasks without paired training data. For quantitative comparisons, we measure realism with user study and diversity with a perceptual distance metric. We apply the proposed model to domain adaptation and show competitive performance when compared to the state-of-the-art on the MNIST-M and the LineMod datasets.