Finding target persons in full scene images with a query of text description has important practical applications in intelligent video surveillance.However, different from the real-world scenarios where the bounding boxes are not available, existing text-based person retrieval methods mainly focus on the cross modal matching between the query text descriptions and the gallery of cropped pedestrian images. To close the gap, we study the problem of text-based person search in full images by proposing a new end-to-end learning framework which jointly optimize the pedestrian detection, identification and visual-semantic feature embedding tasks. To take full advantage of the query text, the semantic features are leveraged to instruct the Region Proposal Network to pay more attention to the text-described proposals. Besides, a cross-scale visual-semantic embedding mechanism is utilized to improve the performance. To validate the proposed method, we collect and annotate two large-scale benchmark datasets based on the widely adopted image-based person search datasets CUHK-SYSU and PRW. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on the two datasets and compared with the baseline methods, our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance.
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.
In spite of the excellent strides made by end-to-end (E2E) models in speech recognition in recent years, named entity recognition is still challenging but critical for semantic understanding. In order to enhance the ability to recognize named entities in E2E models, previous studies mainly focus on various rule-based or attention-based contextual biasing algorithms. However, their performance might be sensitive to the biasing weight or degraded by excessive attention to the named entity list, along with a risk of false triggering. Inspired by the success of the class-based language model (LM) in named entity recognition in conventional hybrid systems and the effective decoupling of acoustic and linguistic information in the factorized neural Transducer (FNT), we propose a novel E2E model to incorporate class-based LMs into FNT, which is referred as C-FNT. In C-FNT, the language model score of named entities can be associated with the name class instead of its surface form. The experimental results show that our proposed C-FNT presents significant error reduction in named entities without hurting performance in general word recognition.
The reconstruction of indoor scenes from multi-view RGB images is challenging due to the coexistence of flat and texture-less regions alongside delicate and fine-grained regions. Recent methods leverage neural radiance fields aided by predicted surface normal priors to recover the scene geometry. These methods excel in producing complete and smooth results for floor and wall areas. However, they struggle to capture complex surfaces with high-frequency structures due to the inadequate neural representation and the inaccurately predicted normal priors. To improve the capacity of the implicit representation, we propose a hybrid architecture to represent low-frequency and high-frequency regions separately. To enhance the normal priors, we introduce a simple yet effective image sharpening and denoising technique, coupled with a network that estimates the pixel-wise uncertainty of the predicted surface normal vectors. Identifying such uncertainty can prevent our model from being misled by unreliable surface normal supervisions that hinder the accurate reconstruction of intricate geometries. Experiments on the benchmark datasets show that our method significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of reconstruction quality.
RGB-T saliency detection has emerged as an important computer vision task, identifying conspicuous objects in challenging scenes such as dark environments. However, existing methods neglect the characteristics of cross-modal features and rely solely on network structures to fuse RGB and thermal features. To address this, we first propose a Multi-Modal Hybrid loss (MMHL) that comprises supervised and self-supervised loss functions. The supervised loss component of MMHL distinctly utilizes semantic features from different modalities, while the self-supervised loss component reduces the distance between RGB and thermal features. We further consider both spatial and channel information during feature fusion and propose the Hybrid Fusion Module to effectively fuse RGB and thermal features. Lastly, instead of jointly training the network with cross-modal features, we implement a sequential training strategy which performs training only on RGB images in the first stage and then learns cross-modal features in the second stage. This training strategy improves saliency detection performance without computational overhead. Results from performance evaluation and ablation studies demonstrate the superior performance achieved by the proposed method compared with the existing state-of-the-art methods.
Recent progresses in large-scale text-to-image models have yielded remarkable accomplishments, finding various applications in art domain. However, expressing unique characteristics of an artwork (e.g. brushwork, colortone, or composition) with text prompts alone may encounter limitations due to the inherent constraints of verbal description. To this end, we introduce DreamStyler, a novel framework designed for artistic image synthesis, proficient in both text-to-image synthesis and style transfer. DreamStyler optimizes a multi-stage textual embedding with a context-aware text prompt, resulting in prominent image quality. In addition, with content and style guidance, DreamStyler exhibits flexibility to accommodate a range of style references. Experimental results demonstrate its superior performance across multiple scenarios, suggesting its promising potential in artistic product creation.
Bilevel optimization enjoys a wide range of applications in hyper-parameter optimization, meta-learning and reinforcement learning. However, bilevel optimization problems are difficult to solve. Recent progress on scalable bilevel algorithms mainly focuses on bilevel optimization problems where the lower-level objective is either strongly convex or unconstrained. In this work, we tackle the bilevel problem through the lens of the penalty method. We show that under certain conditions, the penalty reformulation recovers the solutions of the original bilevel problem. Further, we propose the penalty-based bilevel gradient descent (PBGD) algorithm and establish its finite-time convergence for the constrained bilevel problem without lower-level strong convexity. Experiments showcase the efficiency of the proposed PBGD algorithm.
Current models for event causality identification (ECI) mainly adopt a supervised framework, which heavily rely on labeled data for training. Unfortunately, the scale of current annotated datasets is relatively limited, which cannot provide sufficient support for models to capture useful indicators from causal statements, especially for handing those new, unseen cases. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel approach, shortly named CauSeRL, which leverages external causal statements for event causality identification. First of all, we design a self-supervised framework to learn context-specific causal patterns from external causal statements. Then, we adopt a contrastive transfer strategy to incorporate the learned context-specific causal patterns into the target ECI model. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms previous methods on EventStoryLine and Causal-TimeBank (+2.0 and +3.4 points on F1 value respectively).
Most object recognition approaches predominantly focus on learning discriminative visual patterns while overlooking the holistic object structure. Though important, structure modeling usually requires significant manual annotations and therefore is labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose to "look into object" (explicitly yet intrinsically model the object structure) through incorporating self-supervisions into the traditional framework. We show the recognition backbone can be substantially enhanced for more robust representation learning, without any cost of extra annotation and inference speed. Specifically, we first propose an object-extent learning module for localizing the object according to the visual patterns shared among the instances in the same category. We then design a spatial context learning module for modeling the internal structures of the object, through predicting the relative positions within the extent. These two modules can be easily plugged into any backbone networks during training and detached at inference time. Extensive experiments show that our look-into-object approach (LIO) achieves large performance gain on a number of benchmarks, including generic object recognition (ImageNet) and fine-grained object recognition tasks (CUB, Cars, Aircraft). We also show that this learning paradigm is highly generalizable to other tasks such as object detection and segmentation (MS COCO). Project page: //github.com/JDAI-CV/LIO.
The recent proliferation of knowledge graphs (KGs) coupled with incomplete or partial information, in the form of missing relations (links) between entities, has fueled a lot of research on knowledge base completion (also known as relation prediction). Several recent works suggest that convolutional neural network (CNN) based models generate richer and more expressive feature embeddings and hence also perform well on relation prediction. However, we observe that these KG embeddings treat triples independently and thus fail to cover the complex and hidden information that is inherently implicit in the local neighborhood surrounding a triple. To this effect, our paper proposes a novel attention based feature embedding that captures both entity and relation features in any given entity's neighborhood. Additionally, we also encapsulate relation clusters and multihop relations in our model. Our empirical study offers insights into the efficacy of our attention based model and we show marked performance gains in comparison to state of the art methods on all datasets.
The low resolution of objects of interest in aerial images makes pedestrian detection and action detection extremely challenging tasks. Furthermore, using deep convolutional neural networks to process large images can be demanding in terms of computational requirements. In order to alleviate these challenges, we propose a two-step, yes and no question answering framework to find specific individuals doing one or multiple specific actions in aerial images. First, a deep object detector, Single Shot Multibox Detector (SSD), is used to generate object proposals from small aerial images. Second, another deep network, is used to learn a latent common sub-space which associates the high resolution aerial imagery and the pedestrian action labels that are provided by the human-based sources