Person re-identification (re-ID) is a challenging task that aims to learn discriminative features for person retrieval. In person re-ID, Jaccard distance is a widely used distance metric, especially in re-ranking and clustering scenarios. However, we discover that camera variation has a significant negative impact on the reliability of Jaccard distance. In particular, Jaccard distance calculates the distance based on the overlap of relevant neighbors. Due to camera variation, intra-camera samples dominate the relevant neighbors, which reduces the reliability of the neighbors by introducing intra-camera negative samples and excluding inter-camera positive samples. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel camera-aware Jaccard (CA-Jaccard) distance that leverages camera information to enhance the reliability of Jaccard distance. Specifically, we introduce camera-aware k-reciprocal nearest neighbors (CKRNNs) to find k-reciprocal nearest neighbors on the intra-camera and inter-camera ranking lists, which improves the reliability of relevant neighbors and guarantees the contribution of inter-camera samples in the overlap. Moreover, we propose a camera-aware local query expansion (CLQE) to exploit camera variation as a strong constraint to mine reliable samples in relevant neighbors and assign these samples higher weights in overlap to further improve the reliability. Our CA-Jaccard distance is simple yet effective and can serve as a general distance metric for person re-ID methods with high reliability and low computational cost. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Large language models with instruction-following abilities have revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence. These models show exceptional generalizability to tackle various real-world tasks through their natural language interfaces. However, their performance heavily relies on high-quality exemplar data, which is often difficult to obtain. This challenge is further exacerbated when it comes to multimodal instruction following. We introduce TextBind, an almost annotation-free framework for empowering larger language models with the multi-turn interleaved multimodal instruction-following capabilities. Our approach requires only image-caption pairs and generates multi-turn multimodal instruction-response conversations from a language model. To accommodate interleaved image-text inputs and outputs, we devise MIM, a language model-centric architecture that seamlessly integrates image encoder and decoder models. We release our dataset, model, and demo to foster future research in the area of multimodal instruction following.
The goal of Universal Cross-Domain Retrieval (UCDR) is to achieve robust performance in generalized test scenarios, wherein data may belong to strictly unknown domains and categories during training. Recently, pre-trained models with prompt tuning have shown strong generalization capabilities and attained noteworthy achievements in various downstream tasks, such as few-shot learning and video-text retrieval. However, applying them directly to UCDR may not sufficiently to handle both domain shift (i.e., adapting to unfamiliar domains) and semantic shift (i.e., transferring to unknown categories). To this end, we propose Prompting-to-Simulate (ProS), the first method to apply prompt tuning for UCDR. ProS employs a two-step process to simulate Content-aware Dynamic Prompts (CaDP) which can impact models to produce generalized features for UCDR. Concretely, in Prompt Units Learning stage, we introduce two Prompt Units to individually capture domain and semantic knowledge in a mask-and-align way. Then, in Context-aware Simulator Learning stage, we train a Content-aware Prompt Simulator under a simulated test scenarios to produce the corresponding CaDP. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance without bringing excessive parameters. Our method is publicly available at //anonymous.4open.science/r/ProS
Zero-knowledge proofs (zk-Proofs) are communication protocols by which a prover can demonstrate to a verifier that it possesses a solution to a given public problem without revealing the content of the solution. Arbitrary computations can be transformed into an interactive zk-Proof so anyone is convinced that it was executed correctly without knowing what was executed on, having huge implications for digital currency. Despite this, interactive proofs are not suited for blockchain applications but novel protocols such as zk-SNARKs have made zero-knowledge ledgers like Zcash possible. This project builds upon Wolfram's ZeroKnowledgeProofs paclet and implements a zk-SNARK compiler based on Pinocchio protocol.
Aerial-ground person re-identification (Re-ID) presents unique challenges in computer vision, stemming from the distinct differences in viewpoints, poses, and resolutions between high-altitude aerial and ground-based cameras. Existing research predominantly focuses on ground-to-ground matching, with aerial matching less explored due to a dearth of comprehensive datasets. To address this, we introduce AG-ReID.v2, a dataset specifically designed for person Re-ID in mixed aerial and ground scenarios. This dataset comprises 100,502 images of 1,615 unique individuals, each annotated with matching IDs and 15 soft attribute labels. Data were collected from diverse perspectives using a UAV, stationary CCTV, and smart glasses-integrated camera, providing a rich variety of intra-identity variations. Additionally, we have developed an explainable attention network tailored for this dataset. This network features a three-stream architecture that efficiently processes pairwise image distances, emphasizes key top-down features, and adapts to variations in appearance due to altitude differences. Comparative evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing baselines. We plan to release the dataset and algorithm source code publicly, aiming to advance research in this specialized field of computer vision. For access, please visit //github.com/huynguyen792/AG-ReID.v2.
Unsupervised person re-identification (Re-ID) attracts increasing attention due to its potential to resolve the scalability problem of supervised Re-ID models. Most existing unsupervised methods adopt an iterative clustering mechanism, where the network was trained based on pseudo labels generated by unsupervised clustering. However, clustering errors are inevitable. To generate high-quality pseudo-labels and mitigate the impact of clustering errors, we propose a novel clustering relationship modeling framework for unsupervised person Re-ID. Specifically, before clustering, the relation between unlabeled images is explored based on a graph correlation learning (GCL) module and the refined features are then used for clustering to generate high-quality pseudo-labels.Thus, GCL adaptively mines the relationship between samples in a mini-batch to reduce the impact of abnormal clustering when training. To train the network more effectively, we further propose a selective contrastive learning (SCL) method with a selective memory bank update policy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method shows much better results than most state-of-the-art unsupervised methods on Market1501, DukeMTMC-reID and MSMT17 datasets. We will release the code for model reproduction.
Graph Convolution Networks (GCNs) manifest great potential in recommendation. This is attributed to their capability on learning good user and item embeddings by exploiting the collaborative signals from the high-order neighbors. Like other GCN models, the GCN based recommendation models also suffer from the notorious over-smoothing problem - when stacking more layers, node embeddings become more similar and eventually indistinguishable, resulted in performance degradation. The recently proposed LightGCN and LR-GCN alleviate this problem to some extent, however, we argue that they overlook an important factor for the over-smoothing problem in recommendation, that is, high-order neighboring users with no common interests of a user can be also involved in the user's embedding learning in the graph convolution operation. As a result, the multi-layer graph convolution will make users with dissimilar interests have similar embeddings. In this paper, we propose a novel Interest-aware Message-Passing GCN (IMP-GCN) recommendation model, which performs high-order graph convolution inside subgraphs. The subgraph consists of users with similar interests and their interacted items. To form the subgraphs, we design an unsupervised subgraph generation module, which can effectively identify users with common interests by exploiting both user feature and graph structure. To this end, our model can avoid propagating negative information from high-order neighbors into embedding learning. Experimental results on three large-scale benchmark datasets show that our model can gain performance improvement by stacking more layers and outperform the state-of-the-art GCN-based recommendation models significantly.
Zero-shot Learning (ZSL), which aims to predict for those classes that have never appeared in the training data, has arisen hot research interests. The key of implementing ZSL is to leverage the prior knowledge of classes which builds the semantic relationship between classes and enables the transfer of the learned models (e.g., features) from training classes (i.e., seen classes) to unseen classes. However, the priors adopted by the existing methods are relatively limited with incomplete semantics. In this paper, we explore richer and more competitive prior knowledge to model the inter-class relationship for ZSL via ontology-based knowledge representation and semantic embedding. Meanwhile, to address the data imbalance between seen classes and unseen classes, we developed a generative ZSL framework with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Our main findings include: (i) an ontology-enhanced ZSL framework that can be applied to different domains, such as image classification (IMGC) and knowledge graph completion (KGC); (ii) a comprehensive evaluation with multiple zero-shot datasets from different domains, where our method often achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art models. In particular, on four representative ZSL baselines of IMGC, the ontology-based class semantics outperform the previous priors e.g., the word embeddings of classes by an average of 12.4 accuracy points in the standard ZSL across two example datasets (see Figure 4).
Knowledge graphs capture structured information and relations between a set of entities or items. As such they represent an attractive source of information that could help improve recommender systems. However existing approaches in this domain rely on manual feature engineering and do not allow for end-to-end training. Here we propose knowledge-aware graph neural networks with label smoothness regularization to provide better recommendations. Conceptually, our approach computes user-specific item embeddings by first applying a trainable function that identifies important knowledge graph relationships for a given user. This way we transform the knowledge graph into a user-specific weighted graph and then applies a graph neural network to compute personalized item embeddings. To provide better inductive bias, we use label smoothness, which assumes that adjacent items in the knowledge graph are likely to have similar user relevance labels/scores. Label smoothness provides regularization over edge weights and we prove that it is equivalent to a label propagation scheme on a graph. Finally, we combine knowledge-aware graph neural networks and label smoothness and present the unified model. Experiment results show that our method outperforms strong baselines in four datasets. It also achieves strong performance in the scenario where user-item interactions are sparse.
Person Re-identification (re-id) faces two major challenges: the lack of cross-view paired training data and learning discriminative identity-sensitive and view-invariant features in the presence of large pose variations. In this work, we address both problems by proposing a novel deep person image generation model for synthesizing realistic person images conditional on pose. The model is based on a generative adversarial network (GAN) and used specifically for pose normalization in re-id, thus termed pose-normalization GAN (PN-GAN). With the synthesized images, we can learn a new type of deep re-id feature free of the influence of pose variations. We show that this feature is strong on its own and highly complementary to features learned with the original images. Importantly, we now have a model that generalizes to any new re-id dataset without the need for collecting any training data for model fine-tuning, thus making a deep re-id model truly scalable. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art models, often significantly. In particular, the features learned on Market-1501 can achieve a Rank-1 accuracy of 68.67% on VIPeR without any model fine-tuning, beating almost all existing models fine-tuned on the dataset.
Person re-identification (\textit{re-id}) refers to matching pedestrians across disjoint yet non-overlapping camera views. The most effective way to match these pedestrians undertaking significant visual variations is to seek reliably invariant features that can describe the person of interest faithfully. Most of existing methods are presented in a supervised manner to produce discriminative features by relying on labeled paired images in correspondence. However, annotating pair-wise images is prohibitively expensive in labors, and thus not practical in large-scale networked cameras. Moreover, seeking comparable representations across camera views demands a flexible model to address the complex distributions of images. In this work, we study the co-occurrence statistic patterns between pairs of images, and propose to crossing Generative Adversarial Network (Cross-GAN) for learning a joint distribution for cross-image representations in a unsupervised manner. Given a pair of person images, the proposed model consists of the variational auto-encoder to encode the pair into respective latent variables, a proposed cross-view alignment to reduce the view disparity, and an adversarial layer to seek the joint distribution of latent representations. The learned latent representations are well-aligned to reflect the co-occurrence patterns of paired images. We empirically evaluate the proposed model against challenging datasets, and our results show the importance of joint invariant features in improving matching rates of person re-id with comparison to semi/unsupervised state-of-the-arts.