It is not only sufficient to construct computational models that can accurately classify or detect fake images from real images taken from a camera, but it is also important to ensure whether these computational models are fair enough or produce biased outcomes that can eventually harm certain social groups or cause serious security threats. Exploring fairness in forensic algorithms is an initial step towards correcting these biases. Since visual transformers are recently being widely used in most image classification based tasks due to their capability to produce high accuracies, this study tries to explore bias in the transformer based image forensic algorithms that classify natural and GAN generated images. By procuring a bias evaluation corpora, this study analyzes bias in gender, racial, affective, and intersectional domains using a wide set of individual and pairwise bias evaluation measures. As the generalizability of the algorithms against image compression is an important factor to be considered in forensic tasks, this study also analyzes the role of image compression on model bias. Hence to study the impact of image compression on model bias, a two phase evaluation setting is followed, where a set of experiments is carried out in the uncompressed evaluation setting and the other in the compressed evaluation setting.
How do two sets of images differ? Discerning set-level differences is crucial for understanding model behaviors and analyzing datasets, yet manually sifting through thousands of images is impractical. To aid in this discovery process, we explore the task of automatically describing the differences between two $\textbf{sets}$ of images, which we term Set Difference Captioning. This task takes in image sets $D_A$ and $D_B$, and outputs a description that is more often true on $D_A$ than $D_B$. We outline a two-stage approach that first proposes candidate difference descriptions from image sets and then re-ranks the candidates by checking how well they can differentiate the two sets. We introduce VisDiff, which first captions the images and prompts a language model to propose candidate descriptions, then re-ranks these descriptions using CLIP. To evaluate VisDiff, we collect VisDiffBench, a dataset with 187 paired image sets with ground truth difference descriptions. We apply VisDiff to various domains, such as comparing datasets (e.g., ImageNet vs. ImageNetV2), comparing classification models (e.g., zero-shot CLIP vs. supervised ResNet), summarizing model failure modes (supervised ResNet), characterizing differences between generative models (e.g., StableDiffusionV1 and V2), and discovering what makes images memorable. Using VisDiff, we are able to find interesting and previously unknown differences in datasets and models, demonstrating its utility in revealing nuanced insights.
Ambigrams are calligraphic designs that have different meanings depending on the viewing orientation. Creating ambigrams is a challenging task even for skilled artists, as it requires maintaining the meaning under two different viewpoints at the same time. In this work, we propose to generate ambigrams by distilling a large-scale vision and language diffusion model, namely DeepFloyd IF, to optimize the letters' outline for legibility in the two viewing orientations. Empirically, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing ambigram generation methods. On the 500 most common words in English, our method achieves more than an 11.6% increase in word accuracy and at least a 41.9% reduction in edit distance.
Recently, Google proposes DDVM which for the first time demonstrates that a general diffusion model for image-to-image translation task works impressively well on optical flow estimation task without any specific designs like RAFT. However, DDVM is still a closed-source model with the expensive and private Palette-style pretraining. In this technical report, we present the first open-source DDVM by reproducing it. We study several design choices and find those important ones. By training on 40k public data with 4 GPUs, our reproduction achieves comparable performance to the closed-source DDVM. The code and model have been released in //github.com/DQiaole/FlowDiffusion_pytorch.
Transformer-based models for anomaly detection in multivariate time series can benefit from the self-attention mechanism due to its advantage in modeling long-term dependencies. However, Transformer-based anomaly detection models have problems such as a large amount of data being required for training, standard positional encoding is not suitable for multivariate time series data, and the interdependence between time series is not considered. To address these limitations, we propose a novel anomaly detection method, named EdgeConvFormer, which integrates Time2vec embedding, stacked dynamic graph CNN, and Transformer to extract global and local spatial-time information. This design of EdgeConvFormer empowers it with decomposition capacities for complex time series, progressive spatiotemporal correlation discovery between time series, and representation aggregation of multi-scale features. Experiments demonstrate that EdgeConvFormer can learn the spatial-temporal correlations from multivariate time series data and achieve better anomaly detection performance than the state-of-the-art approaches on many real-world datasets of different scales.
Deep neural network models have achieved remarkable progress in 3D scene understanding while trained in the closed-set setting and with full labels. However, the major bottleneck for current 3D recognition approaches is that they do not have the capacity to recognize any unseen novel classes beyond the training categories in diverse kinds of real-world applications. In the meantime, current state-of-the-art 3D scene understanding approaches primarily require high-quality labels to train neural networks, which merely perform well in a fully supervised manner. This work presents a generalized and simple framework for dealing with 3D scene understanding when the labeled scenes are quite limited. To extract knowledge for novel categories from the pre-trained vision-language models, we propose a hierarchical feature-aligned pre-training and knowledge distillation strategy to extract and distill meaningful information from large-scale vision-language models, which helps benefit the open-vocabulary scene understanding tasks. To leverage the boundary information, we propose a novel energy-based loss with boundary awareness benefiting from the region-level boundary predictions. To encourage latent instance discrimination and to guarantee efficiency, we propose the unsupervised region-level semantic contrastive learning scheme for point clouds, using confident predictions of the neural network to discriminate the intermediate feature embeddings at multiple stages. Extensive experiments with both indoor and outdoor scenes demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach in both data-efficient learning and open-world few-shot learning. All codes, models, and data are made publicly available at: //drive.google.com/drive/folders/1M58V-PtR8DBEwD296zJkNg_m2qq-MTAP?usp=sharing.
With the urgent demand for generalized deep models, many pre-trained big models are proposed, such as BERT, ViT, GPT, etc. Inspired by the success of these models in single domains (like computer vision and natural language processing), the multi-modal pre-trained big models have also drawn more and more attention in recent years. In this work, we give a comprehensive survey of these models and hope this paper could provide new insights and helps fresh researchers to track the most cutting-edge works. Specifically, we firstly introduce the background of multi-modal pre-training by reviewing the conventional deep learning, pre-training works in natural language process, computer vision, and speech. Then, we introduce the task definition, key challenges, and advantages of multi-modal pre-training models (MM-PTMs), and discuss the MM-PTMs with a focus on data, objectives, network architectures, and knowledge enhanced pre-training. After that, we introduce the downstream tasks used for the validation of large-scale MM-PTMs, including generative, classification, and regression tasks. We also give visualization and analysis of the model parameters and results on representative downstream tasks. Finally, we point out possible research directions for this topic that may benefit future works. In addition, we maintain a continuously updated paper list for large-scale pre-trained multi-modal big models: //github.com/wangxiao5791509/MultiModal_BigModels_Survey
In the past few years, the emergence of pre-training models has brought uni-modal fields such as computer vision (CV) and natural language processing (NLP) to a new era. Substantial works have shown they are beneficial for downstream uni-modal tasks and avoid training a new model from scratch. So can such pre-trained models be applied to multi-modal tasks? Researchers have explored this problem and made significant progress. This paper surveys recent advances and new frontiers in vision-language pre-training (VLP), including image-text and video-text pre-training. To give readers a better overall grasp of VLP, we first review its recent advances from five aspects: feature extraction, model architecture, pre-training objectives, pre-training datasets, and downstream tasks. Then, we summarize the specific VLP models in detail. Finally, we discuss the new frontiers in VLP. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey on VLP. We hope that this survey can shed light on future research in the VLP field.
Deep reinforcement learning algorithms can perform poorly in real-world tasks due to the discrepancy between source and target environments. This discrepancy is commonly viewed as the disturbance in transition dynamics. Many existing algorithms learn robust policies by modeling the disturbance and applying it to source environments during training, which usually requires prior knowledge about the disturbance and control of simulators. However, these algorithms can fail in scenarios where the disturbance from target environments is unknown or is intractable to model in simulators. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel model-free actor-critic algorithm -- namely, state-conservative policy optimization (SCPO) -- to learn robust policies without modeling the disturbance in advance. Specifically, SCPO reduces the disturbance in transition dynamics to that in state space and then approximates it by a simple gradient-based regularizer. The appealing features of SCPO include that it is simple to implement and does not require additional knowledge about the disturbance or specially designed simulators. Experiments in several robot control tasks demonstrate that SCPO learns robust policies against the disturbance in transition dynamics.
Conventional entity typing approaches are based on independent classification paradigms, which make them difficult to recognize inter-dependent, long-tailed and fine-grained entity types. In this paper, we argue that the implicitly entailed extrinsic and intrinsic dependencies between labels can provide critical knowledge to tackle the above challenges. To this end, we propose \emph{Label Reasoning Network(LRN)}, which sequentially reasons fine-grained entity labels by discovering and exploiting label dependencies knowledge entailed in the data. Specifically, LRN utilizes an auto-regressive network to conduct deductive reasoning and a bipartite attribute graph to conduct inductive reasoning between labels, which can effectively model, learn and reason complex label dependencies in a sequence-to-set, end-to-end manner. Experiments show that LRN achieves the state-of-the-art performance on standard ultra fine-grained entity typing benchmarks, and can also resolve the long tail label problem effectively.
Visual dialogue is a challenging task that needs to extract implicit information from both visual (image) and textual (dialogue history) contexts. Classical approaches pay more attention to the integration of the current question, vision knowledge and text knowledge, despising the heterogeneous semantic gaps between the cross-modal information. In the meantime, the concatenation operation has become de-facto standard to the cross-modal information fusion, which has a limited ability in information retrieval. In this paper, we propose a novel Knowledge-Bridge Graph Network (KBGN) model by using graph to bridge the cross-modal semantic relations between vision and text knowledge in fine granularity, as well as retrieving required knowledge via an adaptive information selection mode. Moreover, the reasoning clues for visual dialogue can be clearly drawn from intra-modal entities and inter-modal bridges. Experimental results on VisDial v1.0 and VisDial-Q datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms exiting models with state-of-the-art results.