Pre-trained Vision-Language Foundation Models utilizing extensive image-text paired data have demonstrated unprecedented image-text association capabilities, achieving remarkable results across various downstream tasks. A critical challenge is how to make use of existing large-scale pre-trained VLMs, which are trained on common objects, to perform the domain-specific transfer for accomplishing domain-related downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose a new framework that includes the Domain Foundation Model (DFM), bridging the gap between the General Foundation Model (GFM) and domain-specific downstream tasks. Moreover, we present an image-text paired dataset in the field of remote sensing (RS), RS5M, which has 5 million RS images with English descriptions. The dataset is obtained from filtering publicly available image-text paired datasets and captioning label-only RS datasets with pre-trained VLM. These constitute the first large-scale RS image-text paired dataset. Additionally, we tried several Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning methods on RS5M to implement the DFM. Experimental results show that our proposed dataset are highly effective for various tasks, improving upon the baseline by $8 \% \sim 16 \%$ in zero-shot classification tasks, and obtaining good results in both Vision-Language Retrieval and Semantic Localization tasks. Finally, we show successful results of training the RS Stable Diffusion model using the RS5M, uncovering more use cases of the dataset.
Recent text-to-image diffusion models have demonstrated an astonishing capacity to generate high-quality images. However, researchers mainly studied the way of synthesizing images with only text prompts. While some works have explored using other modalities as conditions, considerable paired data, e.g., box/mask-image pairs, and fine-tuning time are required for nurturing models. As such paired data is time-consuming and labor-intensive to acquire and restricted to a closed set, this potentially becomes the bottleneck for applications in an open world. This paper focuses on the simplest form of user-provided conditions, e.g., box or scribble. To mitigate the aforementioned problem, we propose a training-free method to control objects and contexts in the synthesized images adhering to the given spatial conditions. Specifically, three spatial constraints, i.e., Inner-Box, Outer-Box, and Corner Constraints, are designed and seamlessly integrated into the denoising step of diffusion models, requiring no additional training and massive annotated layout data. Extensive results show that the proposed constraints can control what and where to present in the images while retaining the ability of the Stable Diffusion model to synthesize with high fidelity and diverse concept coverage. The code is publicly available at //github.com/Sierkinhane/BoxDiff.
While diffusion-based text-to-image (T2I) models provide a simple and powerful way to generate images, guiding this generation remains a challenge. For concepts that are difficult to describe through language, users may struggle to create prompts. Moreover, many of these models are built as end-to-end systems, lacking support for iterative shaping of the image. In response, we introduce PromptPaint, which combines T2I generation with interactions that model how we use colored paints. PromptPaint allows users to go beyond language to mix prompts that express challenging concepts. Just as we iteratively tune colors through layered placements of paint on a physical canvas, PromptPaint similarly allows users to apply different prompts to different canvas areas and times of the generative process. Through a set of studies, we characterize different approaches for mixing prompts, design trade-offs, and socio-technical challenges for generative models. With PromptPaint we provide insight into future steerable generative tools.
Recently, learned image compression has achieved remarkable performance. The entropy model, which estimates the distribution of the latent representation, plays a crucial role in boosting rate-distortion performance. However, most entropy models only capture correlations in one dimension, while the latent representation contain channel-wise, local spatial, and global spatial correlations. To tackle this issue, we propose the Multi-Reference Entropy Model (MEM) and the advanced version, MEM$^+$. These models capture the different types of correlations present in latent representation. Specifically, We first divide the latent representation into slices. When decoding the current slice, we use previously decoded slices as context and employ the attention map of the previously decoded slice to predict global correlations in the current slice. To capture local contexts, we introduce two enhanced checkerboard context capturing techniques that avoids performance degradation. Based on MEM and MEM$^+$, we propose image compression models MLIC and MLIC$^+$. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that our MLIC and MLIC$^+$ models achieve state-of-the-art performance, reducing BD-rate by $8.05\%$ and $11.39\%$ on the Kodak dataset compared to VTM-17.0 when measured in PSNR. Our code will be available at //github.com/JiangWeibeta/MLIC.
Transformer-based methods have exhibited remarkable potential in single image super-resolution (SISR) by effectively extracting long-range dependencies. However, most of the current research in this area has prioritized the design of transformer blocks to capture global information, while overlooking the importance of incorporating high-frequency priors, which we believe could be beneficial. In our study, we conducted a series of experiments and found that transformer structures are more adept at capturing low-frequency information, but have limited capacity in constructing high-frequency representations when compared to their convolutional counterparts. Our proposed solution, the cross-refinement adaptive feature modulation transformer (CRAFT), integrates the strengths of both convolutional and transformer structures. It comprises three key components: the high-frequency enhancement residual block (HFERB) for extracting high-frequency information, the shift rectangle window attention block (SRWAB) for capturing global information, and the hybrid fusion block (HFB) for refining the global representation. Our experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that CRAFT outperforms state-of-the-art methods by up to 0.29dB while using fewer parameters. The source code will be made available at: //github.com/AVC2-UESTC/CRAFT-SR.git.
We propose a novel method, LoLep, which regresses Locally-Learned planes from a single RGB image to represent scenes accurately, thus generating better novel views. Without the depth information, regressing appropriate plane locations is a challenging problem. To solve this issue, we pre-partition the disparity space into bins and design a disparity sampler to regress local offsets for multiple planes in each bin. However, only using such a sampler makes the network not convergent; we further propose two optimizing strategies that combine with different disparity distributions of datasets and propose an occlusion-aware reprojection loss as a simple yet effective geometric supervision technique. We also introduce a self-attention mechanism to improve occlusion inference and present a Block-Sampling Self-Attention (BS-SA) module to address the problem of applying self-attention to large feature maps. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and generate state-of-the-art results on different datasets. Compared to MINE, our approach has an LPIPS reduction of 4.8%-9.0% and an RV reduction of 73.9%-83.5%. We also evaluate the performance on real-world images and demonstrate the benefits.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown outstanding performance across wide range of downstream tasks. This competency is attributed to their substantial parameter size and pre-training on extensive corpus. Moreover, LLMs have exhibited enhanced reasoning capabilities in tackling complex reasoning tasks, owing to the utilization of a method named ``Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting''. This method is designed to generate intermediate reasoning steps that guide the inference of the final answer. However, it is essential to highlight that these advanced reasoning abilities appear to emerge in models with a minimum of 10 billion parameters, thereby limiting its efficacy in situations where computational resources are constrained. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of transferring the reasoning capabilities of LLMs to smaller models via knowledge distillation. Specifically, we propose Sci-CoT, a two-stage framework that separates the processes of generating rationales and inferring answers. This method enables a more efficient use of rationales during the answer inference stage, leading to improved performance on scientific question-answering tasks. Utilizing Sci-CoT, our 80-million parameter model is able to exceed the performance of BLOOM-176B in the ARC-Easy dataset under the few shot setting.
To mitigate the necessity for large amounts of supervised segmentation annotation sets, multiple Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) strategies have been devised. These will often rely on advanced data and model regularization strategies to instigate the development of useful properties (e.g., prediction completeness and fidelity to semantic boundaries) in segmentation priors, notwithstanding the lack of annotated information. In this work, we first create a strong baseline by analyzing complementary WSSS techniques and regularizing strategies, considering their strengths and limitations. We then propose a new Class-specific Adversarial Erasing strategy, comprising two adversarial CAM generating networks being gradually refined to produce robust semantic segmentation proposals. Empirical results suggest that our approach induces substantial improvement in the effectiveness of the baseline, resulting in a noticeable improvement over both Pascal VOC 2012 and MS COCO 2014 datasets.
Fabricating and designing 3D garments has become extremely demanding with the increasing need for synthesizing realistic dressed persons for a variety of applications, e.g. 3D virtual try-on, digitalization of 2D clothes into 3D apparel, and cloth animation. It thus necessitates a simple and straightforward pipeline to obtain high-quality texture from simple input, such as 2D reference images. Since traditional warping-based texture generation methods require a significant number of control points to be manually selected for each type of garment, which can be a time-consuming and tedious process. We propose a novel method, called Cloth2Tex, which eliminates the human burden in this process. Cloth2Tex is a self-supervised method that generates texture maps with reasonable layout and structural consistency. Another key feature of Cloth2Tex is that it can be used to support high-fidelity texture inpainting. This is done by combining Cloth2Tex with a prevailing latent diffusion model. We evaluate our approach both qualitatively and quantitatively and demonstrate that Cloth2Tex can generate high-quality texture maps and achieve the best visual effects in comparison to other methods. Project page: tomguluson92.github.io/projects/cloth2tex/
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.
Few-shot image classification aims to classify unseen classes with limited labeled samples. Recent works benefit from the meta-learning process with episodic tasks and can fast adapt to class from training to testing. Due to the limited number of samples for each task, the initial embedding network for meta learning becomes an essential component and can largely affects the performance in practice. To this end, many pre-trained methods have been proposed, and most of them are trained in supervised way with limited transfer ability for unseen classes. In this paper, we proposed to train a more generalized embedding network with self-supervised learning (SSL) which can provide slow and robust representation for downstream tasks by learning from the data itself. We evaluate our work by extensive comparisons with previous baseline methods on two few-shot classification datasets ({\em i.e.,} MiniImageNet and CUB). Based on the evaluation results, the proposed method achieves significantly better performance, i.e., improve 1-shot and 5-shot tasks by nearly \textbf{3\%} and \textbf{4\%} on MiniImageNet, by nearly \textbf{9\%} and \textbf{3\%} on CUB. Moreover, the proposed method can gain the improvement of (\textbf{15\%}, \textbf{13\%}) on MiniImageNet and (\textbf{15\%}, \textbf{8\%}) on CUB by pretraining using more unlabeled data. Our code will be available at \hyperref[//github.com/phecy/SSL-FEW-SHOT.]{//github.com/phecy/ssl-few-shot.}