Stroke-based rendering aims to recreate an image with a set of strokes. Most existing methods render complex images using an uniform-block-dividing strategy, which leads to boundary inconsistency artifacts. To solve the problem, we propose Compositional Neural Painter, a novel stroke-based rendering framework which dynamically predicts the next painting region based on the current canvas, instead of dividing the image plane uniformly into painting regions. We start from an empty canvas and divide the painting process into several steps. At each step, a compositor network trained with a phasic RL strategy first predicts the next painting region, then a painter network trained with a WGAN discriminator predicts stroke parameters, and a stroke renderer paints the strokes onto the painting region of the current canvas. Moreover, we extend our method to stroke-based style transfer with a novel differentiable distance transform loss, which helps preserve the structure of the input image during stroke-based stylization. Extensive experiments show our model outperforms the existing models in both stroke-based neural painting and stroke-based stylization. Code is available at //github.com/sjtuplayer/Compositional_Neural_Painter
Table-based question answering (TableQA) is an important task in natural language processing, which requires comprehending tables and employing various reasoning ways to answer the questions. This paper introduces TableQAKit, the first comprehensive toolkit designed specifically for TableQA. The toolkit designs a unified platform that includes plentiful TableQA datasets and integrates popular methods of this task as well as large language models (LLMs). Users can add their datasets and methods according to the friendly interface. Also, pleasantly surprised using the modules in this toolkit achieves new SOTA on some datasets. Finally, \tableqakit{} also provides an LLM-based TableQA Benchmark for evaluating the role of LLMs in TableQA. TableQAKit is open-source with an interactive interface that includes visual operations, and comprehensive data for ease of use.
Cooperative inference in Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), achieved by deploying partitioned Deep Neural Network (DNN) models between resource-constrained user equipments (UEs) and edge servers (ESs), has emerged as a promising paradigm. Firstly, we consider scenarios of continuous Artificial Intelligence (AI) task arrivals, like the object detection for video streams, and utilize a serial queuing model for the accurate evaluation of End-to-End (E2E) delay in cooperative edge inference. Secondly, to enhance the long-term performance of inference systems, we formulate a multi-slot stochastic E2E delay optimization problem that jointly considers model partitioning and multi-dimensional resource allocation. Finally, to solve this problem, we introduce a Lyapunov-guided Multi-Dimensional Optimization algorithm (LyMDO) that decouples the original problem into per-slot deterministic problems, where Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and convex optimization are used for joint optimization of partitioning decisions and complementary resource allocation. Simulation results show that our approach effectively improves E2E delay while balancing long-term resource constraints.
We propose the application of Transformer-based language models for classifying entity legal forms from raw legal entity names. Specifically, we employ various BERT variants and compare their performance against multiple traditional baselines. Our evaluation encompasses a substantial subset of freely available Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) data, comprising over 1.1 million legal entities from 30 different legal jurisdictions. The ground truth labels for classification per jurisdiction are taken from the Entity Legal Form (ELF) code standard (ISO 20275). Our findings demonstrate that pre-trained BERT variants outperform traditional text classification approaches in terms of F1 score, while also performing comparably well in the Macro F1 Score. Moreover, the validity of our proposal is supported by the outcome of third-party expert reviews conducted in ten selected jurisdictions. This study highlights the significant potential of Transformer-based models in advancing data standardization and data integration. The presented approaches can greatly benefit financial institutions, corporations, governments and other organizations in assessing business relationships, understanding risk exposure, and promoting effective governance.
Text-guided diffusion models have revolutionized image generation and editing, offering exceptional realism and diversity. Specifically, in the context of diffusion-based editing, where a source image is edited according to a target prompt, the process commences by acquiring a noisy latent vector corresponding to the source image via the diffusion model. This vector is subsequently fed into separate source and target diffusion branches for editing. The accuracy of this inversion process significantly impacts the final editing outcome, influencing both essential content preservation of the source image and edit fidelity according to the target prompt. Prior inversion techniques aimed at finding a unified solution in both the source and target diffusion branches. However, our theoretical and empirical analyses reveal that disentangling these branches leads to a distinct separation of responsibilities for preserving essential content and ensuring edit fidelity. Building on this insight, we introduce "Direct Inversion," a novel technique achieving optimal performance of both branches with just three lines of code. To assess image editing performance, we present PIE-Bench, an editing benchmark with 700 images showcasing diverse scenes and editing types, accompanied by versatile annotations and comprehensive evaluation metrics. Compared to state-of-the-art optimization-based inversion techniques, our solution not only yields superior performance across 8 editing methods but also achieves nearly an order of speed-up.
Low-light image enhancement tasks demand an appropriate balance among brightness, color, and illumination. While existing methods often focus on one aspect of the image without considering how to pay attention to this balance, which will cause problems of color distortion and overexposure etc. This seriously affects both human visual perception and the performance of high-level visual models. In this work, a novel synergistic structure is proposed which can balance brightness, color, and illumination more effectively. Specifically, the proposed method, so-called Joint Correcting and Refinement Network (JCRNet), which mainly consists of three stages to balance brightness, color, and illumination of enhancement. Stage 1: we utilize a basic encoder-decoder and local supervision mechanism to extract local information and more comprehensive details for enhancement. Stage 2: cross-stage feature transmission and spatial feature transformation further facilitate color correction and feature refinement. Stage 3: we employ a dynamic illumination adjustment approach to embed residuals between predicted and ground truth images into the model, adaptively adjusting illumination balance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits comprehensive performance advantages over 21 state-of-the-art methods on 9 benchmark datasets. Furthermore, a more persuasive experiment has been conducted to validate our approach the effectiveness in downstream visual tasks (e.g., saliency detection). Compared to several enhancement models, the proposed method effectively improves the segmentation results and quantitative metrics of saliency detection. The source code will be available at //github.com/woshiyll/JCRNet.
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.
Dense video captioning aims to generate text descriptions for all events in an untrimmed video. This involves both detecting and describing events. Therefore, all previous methods on dense video captioning tackle this problem by building two models, i.e. an event proposal and a captioning model, for these two sub-problems. The models are either trained separately or in alternation. This prevents direct influence of the language description to the event proposal, which is important for generating accurate descriptions. To address this problem, we propose an end-to-end transformer model for dense video captioning. The encoder encodes the video into appropriate representations. The proposal decoder decodes from the encoding with different anchors to form video event proposals. The captioning decoder employs a masking network to restrict its attention to the proposal event over the encoding feature. This masking network converts the event proposal to a differentiable mask, which ensures the consistency between the proposal and captioning during training. In addition, our model employs a self-attention mechanism, which enables the use of efficient non-recurrent structure during encoding and leads to performance improvements. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this end-to-end model on ActivityNet Captions and YouCookII datasets, where we achieved 10.12 and 6.58 METEOR score, respectively.
Recently, ensemble has been applied to deep metric learning to yield state-of-the-art results. Deep metric learning aims to learn deep neural networks for feature embeddings, distances of which satisfy given constraint. In deep metric learning, ensemble takes average of distances learned by multiple learners. As one important aspect of ensemble, the learners should be diverse in their feature embeddings. To this end, we propose an attention-based ensemble, which uses multiple attention masks, so that each learner can attend to different parts of the object. We also propose a divergence loss, which encourages diversity among the learners. The proposed method is applied to the standard benchmarks of deep metric learning and experimental results show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin on image retrieval tasks.
Top-down visual attention mechanisms have been used extensively in image captioning and visual question answering (VQA) to enable deeper image understanding through fine-grained analysis and even multiple steps of reasoning. In this work, we propose a combined bottom-up and top-down attention mechanism that enables attention to be calculated at the level of objects and other salient image regions. This is the natural basis for attention to be considered. Within our approach, the bottom-up mechanism (based on Faster R-CNN) proposes image regions, each with an associated feature vector, while the top-down mechanism determines feature weightings. Applying this approach to image captioning, our results on the MSCOCO test server establish a new state-of-the-art for the task, achieving CIDEr / SPICE / BLEU-4 scores of 117.9, 21.5 and 36.9, respectively. Demonstrating the broad applicability of the method, applying the same approach to VQA we obtain first place in the 2017 VQA Challenge.
Attention mechanism has been used as an ancillary means to help RNN or CNN. However, the Transformer (Vaswani et al., 2017) recently recorded the state-of-the-art performance in machine translation with a dramatic reduction in training time by solely using attention. Motivated by the Transformer, Directional Self Attention Network (Shen et al., 2017), a fully attention-based sentence encoder, was proposed. It showed good performance with various data by using forward and backward directional information in a sentence. But in their study, not considered at all was the distance between words, an important feature when learning the local dependency to help understand the context of input text. We propose Distance-based Self-Attention Network, which considers the word distance by using a simple distance mask in order to model the local dependency without losing the ability of modeling global dependency which attention has inherent. Our model shows good performance with NLI data, and it records the new state-of-the-art result with SNLI data. Additionally, we show that our model has a strength in long sentences or documents.