We propose a simple three-stage approach to segment unseen objects in RGB images using their CAD models. Leveraging recent powerful foundation models, DINOv2 and Segment Anything, we create descriptors and generate proposals, including binary masks for a given input RGB image. By matching proposals with reference descriptors created from CAD models, we achieve precise object ID assignment along with modal masks. We experimentally demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results in CAD-based novel object segmentation, surpassing existing approaches on the seven core datasets of the BOP challenge by 19.8% AP using the same BOP evaluation protocol. Our source code is available at //github.com/nv-nguyen/cnos.
Material reconstruction from a photograph is a key component of 3D content creation democratization. We propose to formulate this ill-posed problem as a controlled synthesis one, leveraging the recent progress in generative deep networks. We present ControlMat, a method which, given a single photograph with uncontrolled illumination as input, conditions a diffusion model to generate plausible, tileable, high-resolution physically-based digital materials. We carefully analyze the behavior of diffusion models for multi-channel outputs, adapt the sampling process to fuse multi-scale information and introduce rolled diffusion to enable both tileability and patched diffusion for high-resolution outputs. Our generative approach further permits exploration of a variety of materials which could correspond to the input image, mitigating the unknown lighting conditions. We show that our approach outperforms recent inference and latent-space-optimization methods, and carefully validate our diffusion process design choices. Supplemental materials and additional details are available at: //gvecchio.com/controlmat/.
In this work, we investigate two popular end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) models, namely Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) and RNN-Transducer (RNN-T), for offline recognition of voice search queries, with up to 2B model parameters. The encoders of our models use the neural architecture of Google's universal speech model (USM), with additional funnel pooling layers to significantly reduce the frame rate and speed up training and inference. We perform extensive studies on vocabulary size, time reduction strategy, and its generalization performance on long-form test sets. Despite the speculation that, as the model size increases, CTC can be as good as RNN-T which builds label dependency into the prediction, we observe that a 900M RNN-T clearly outperforms a 1.8B CTC and is more tolerant to severe time reduction, although the WER gap can be largely removed by LM shallow fusion.
The use of Implicit Neural Representation (INR) through a hash-table has demonstrated impressive effectiveness and efficiency in characterizing intricate signals. However, current state-of-the-art methods exhibit insufficient regularization, often yielding unreliable and noisy results during interpolations. We find that this issue stems from broken gradient flow between input coordinates and indexed hash-keys, where the chain rule attempts to model discrete hash-keys, rather than the continuous coordinates. To tackle this concern, we introduce RHINO, in which a continuous analytical function is incorporated to facilitate regularization by connecting the input coordinate and the network additionally without modifying the architecture of current hash-based INRs. This connection ensures a seamless backpropagation of gradients from the network's output back to the input coordinates, thereby enhancing regularization. Our experimental results not only showcase the broadened regularization capability across different hash-based INRs like DINER and Instant NGP, but also across a variety of tasks such as image fitting, representation of signed distance functions, and optimization of 5D static / 6D dynamic neural radiance fields. Notably, RHINO outperforms current state-of-the-art techniques in both quality and speed, affirming its superiority.
In this paper, we present CaveSeg - the first visual learning pipeline for semantic segmentation and scene parsing for AUV navigation inside underwater caves. We address the problem of scarce annotated training data by preparing a comprehensive dataset for semantic segmentation of underwater cave scenes. It contains pixel annotations for important navigation markers (e.g. caveline, arrows), obstacles (e.g. ground plain and overhead layers), scuba divers, and open areas for servoing. Through comprehensive benchmark analyses on cave systems in USA, Mexico, and Spain locations, we demonstrate that robust deep visual models can be developed based on CaveSeg for fast semantic scene parsing of underwater cave environments. In particular, we formulate a novel transformer-based model that is computationally light and offers near real-time execution in addition to achieving state-of-the-art performance. Finally, we explore the design choices and implications of semantic segmentation for visual servoing by AUVs inside underwater caves. The proposed model and benchmark dataset open up promising opportunities for future research in autonomous underwater cave exploration and mapping.
Transformer-based models excel in speech recognition. Existing efforts to optimize Transformer inference, typically for long-context applications, center on simplifying attention score calculations. However, streaming speech recognition models usually process a limited number of tokens each time, making attention score calculation less of a bottleneck. Instead, the bottleneck lies in the linear projection layers of multi-head attention and feedforward networks, constituting a substantial portion of the model size and contributing significantly to computation, memory, and power usage. To address this bottleneck, we propose folding attention, a technique targeting these linear layers, significantly reducing model size and improving memory and power efficiency. Experiments on on-device Transformer-based streaming speech recognition models show that folding attention reduces model size (and corresponding memory consumption) by up to 24% and power consumption by up to 23%, all without compromising model accuracy or computation overhead.
A good distortion representation is crucial for the success of deep blind image quality assessment (BIQA). However, most previous methods do not effectively model the relationship between distortions or the distribution of samples with the same distortion type but different distortion levels. In this work, we start from the analysis of the relationship between perceptual image quality and distortion-related factors, such as distortion types and levels. Then, we propose a Distortion Graph Representation (DGR) learning framework for IQA, named GraphIQA, in which each distortion is represented as a graph, i.e., DGR. One can distinguish distortion types by learning the contrast relationship between these different DGRs, and infer the ranking distribution of samples from different levels in a DGR. Specifically, we develop two sub-networks to learn the DGRs: a) Type Discrimination Network (TDN) that aims to embed DGR into a compact code for better discriminating distortion types and learning the relationship between types; b) Fuzzy Prediction Network (FPN) that aims to extract the distributional characteristics of the samples in a DGR and predicts fuzzy degrees based on a Gaussian prior. Experiments show that our GraphIQA achieves the state-of-the-art performance on many benchmark datasets of both synthetic and authentic distortions.
Relation triple extraction (RTE) is an essential task in information extraction and knowledge graph construction. Despite recent advancements, existing methods still exhibit certain limitations. They just employ generalized pre-trained models and do not consider the specificity of RTE tasks. Moreover, existing tagging-based approaches typically decompose the RTE task into two subtasks, initially identifying subjects and subsequently identifying objects and relations. They solely focus on extracting relational triples from subject to object, neglecting that once the extraction of a subject fails, it fails in extracting all triples associated with that subject. To address these issues, we propose BitCoin, an innovative Bidirectional tagging and supervised Contrastive learning based joint relational triple extraction framework. Specifically, we design a supervised contrastive learning method that considers multiple positives per anchor rather than restricting it to just one positive. Furthermore, a penalty term is introduced to prevent excessive similarity between the subject and object. Our framework implements taggers in two directions, enabling triples extraction from subject to object and object to subject. Experimental results show that BitCoin achieves state-of-the-art results on the benchmark datasets and significantly improves the F1 score on Normal, SEO, EPO, and multiple relation extraction tasks.
In this paper, we introduce a new approach for high-quality multi-exposure image fusion (MEF). We show that the fusion weights of an exposure can be encoded into a 1D lookup table (LUT), which takes pixel intensity value as input and produces fusion weight as output. We learn one 1D LUT for each exposure, then all the pixels from different exposures can query 1D LUT of that exposure independently for high-quality and efficient fusion. Specifically, to learn these 1D LUTs, we involve attention mechanism in various dimensions including frame, channel and spatial ones into the MEF task so as to bring us significant quality improvement over the state-of-the-art (SOTA). In addition, we collect a new MEF dataset consisting of 960 samples, 155 of which are manually tuned by professionals as ground-truth for evaluation. Our network is trained by this dataset in an unsupervised manner. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of all the newly proposed components, and results show that our approach outperforms the SOTA in our and another representative dataset SICE, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Moreover, our 1D LUT approach takes less than 4ms to run a 4K image on a PC GPU. Given its high quality, efficiency and robustness, our method has been shipped into millions of Android mobiles across multiple brands world-wide. Code is available at: //github.com/Hedlen/MEFLUT.
Transformer-based speech recognition (ASR) model with deep layers exhibited significant performance improvement. However, the model is inefficient for deployment on resource-constrained devices. Layer pruning (LP) is a commonly used compression method to remove redundant layers. Previous studies on LP usually identify the redundant layers according to a task-specific evaluation metric. They are time-consuming for models with a large number of layers, even in a greedy search manner. To address this problem, we propose CoMFLP, a fast search LP algorithm based on correlation measure. The correlation between layers is computed to generate a correlation matrix, which identifies the redundancy among layers. The search process is carried out in two steps: (1) coarse search: to determine top $K$ candidates by pruning the most redundant layers based on the correlation matrix; (2) fine search: to select the best pruning proposal among $K$ candidates using a task-specific evaluation metric. Experiments on an ASR task show that the pruning proposal determined by CoMFLP outperforms existing LP methods while only requiring constant time complexity. The code is publicly available at //github.com/louislau1129/CoMFLP.
Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved great success in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks under the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm. With large quantities of parameters, PLMs are computation-intensive and resource-hungry. Hence, model pruning has been introduced to compress large-scale PLMs. However, most prior approaches only consider task-specific knowledge towards downstream tasks, but ignore the essential task-agnostic knowledge during pruning, which may cause catastrophic forgetting problem and lead to poor generalization ability. To maintain both task-agnostic and task-specific knowledge in our pruned model, we propose ContrAstive Pruning (CAP) under the paradigm of pre-training and fine-tuning. It is designed as a general framework, compatible with both structured and unstructured pruning. Unified in contrastive learning, CAP enables the pruned model to learn from the pre-trained model for task-agnostic knowledge, and fine-tuned model for task-specific knowledge. Besides, to better retain the performance of the pruned model, the snapshots (i.e., the intermediate models at each pruning iteration) also serve as effective supervisions for pruning. Our extensive experiments show that adopting CAP consistently yields significant improvements, especially in extremely high sparsity scenarios. With only 3% model parameters reserved (i.e., 97% sparsity), CAP successfully achieves 99.2% and 96.3% of the original BERT performance in QQP and MNLI tasks. In addition, our probing experiments demonstrate that the model pruned by CAP tends to achieve better generalization ability.