We investigate the challenges of style transfer in multi-modal visual narratives. Among static visual narratives such as comics and manga, there are distinct visual styles in terms of presentation. They include style features across multiple dimensions, such as panel layout, size, shape, and color. They include both visual and text media elements. The layout of both text and media elements is also significant in terms of narrative communication. The sequential transitions between panels are where readers make inferences about the narrative world. These feature differences provide an interesting challenge for style transfer in which there are distinctions between the processing of features for each modality. We introduce the notion of comprehension-preserving style transfer (CPST) in such multi-modal domains. CPST requires not only traditional metrics of style transfer but also metrics of narrative comprehension. To spur further research in this area, we present an annotated dataset of comics and manga and an initial set of algorithms that utilize separate style transfer modules for the visual, textual, and layout parameters. To test whether the style transfer preserves narrative semantics, we evaluate this algorithm through visual story cloze tests inspired by work in computational cognition of narrative systems. Understanding the connection between style and narrative semantics provides insight for applications ranging from informational brochure designs to data storytelling.
Recently, there have been significant advancements in Image Restoration based on CNN and transformer. However, the inherent characteristics of the Image Restoration task are often overlooked in many works. These works often focus on the basic block design and stack numerous basic blocks to the model, leading to redundant parameters and unnecessary computations and hindering the efficiency of the image restoration. In this paper, we propose a Lightweight Image Restoration network called LIR to efficiently remove degradation (blur, rain, noise, haze, etc.). A key component in LIR is the Efficient Adaptive Attention (EAA) Block, which is mainly composed of Adaptive Filters and Attention Blocks. It is capable of adaptively sharpening contours, removing degradation, and capturing global information in various image restoration scenes in an efficient and computation-friendly manner. In addition, through a simple structural design, LIR addresses the degradations existing in the local and global residual connections that are ignored by modern networks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our LIR achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art networks on most benchmarks with fewer parameters and computations. It is worth noting that our LIR produces better visual results than state-of-the-art networks that are more in line with the human aesthetic.
While Transformers have achieved impressive success in natural language processing and computer vision, their performance on 3D point clouds is relatively poor. This is mainly due to the limitation of Transformers: a demanding need for extensive training data. Unfortunately, in the realm of 3D point clouds, the availability of large datasets is a challenge, exacerbating the issue of training Transformers for 3D tasks. In this work, we solve the data issue of point cloud Transformers from two perspectives: (i) introducing more inductive bias to reduce the dependency of Transformers on data, and (ii) relying on cross-modality pretraining. More specifically, we first present Progressive Point Patch Embedding and present a new point cloud Transformer model namely PViT. PViT shares the same backbone as Transformer but is shown to be less hungry for data, enabling Transformer to achieve performance comparable to the state-of-the-art. Second, we formulate a simple yet effective pipeline dubbed "Pix4Point" that allows harnessing Transformers pretrained in the image domain to enhance downstream point cloud understanding. This is achieved through a modality-agnostic Transformer backbone with the help of a tokenizer and decoder specialized in the different domains. Pretrained on a large number of widely available images, significant gains of PViT are observed in the tasks of 3D point cloud classification, part segmentation, and semantic segmentation on ScanObjectNN, ShapeNetPart, and S3DIS, respectively. Our code and models are available at //github.com/guochengqian/Pix4Point .
Existing learned video compression models employ flow net or deformable convolutional networks (DCN) to estimate motion information. However, the limited receptive fields of flow net and DCN inherently direct their attentiveness towards the local contexts. Global contexts, such as large-scale motions and global correlations among frames are ignored, presenting a significant bottleneck for capturing accurate motions. To address this issue, we propose a joint local and global motion compensation module (LGMC) for leaned video coding. More specifically, we adopt flow net for local motion compensation. To capture global context, we employ the cross attention in feature domain for motion compensation. In addition, to avoid the quadratic complexity of vanilla cross attention, we divide the softmax operations in attention into two independent softmax operations, leading to linear complexity. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed LGMC, we integrate it with DCVC-TCM and obtain learned video compression with joint local and global motion compensation (LVC-LGMC). Extensive experiments demonstrate that our LVC-LGMC has significant rate-distortion performance improvements over baseline DCVC-TCM.
We release Code Llama, a family of large language models for code based on Llama 2 providing state-of-the-art performance among open models, infilling capabilities, support for large input contexts, and zero-shot instruction following ability for programming tasks. We provide multiple flavors to cover a wide range of applications: foundation models (Code Llama), Python specializations (Code Llama - Python), and instruction-following models (Code Llama - Instruct) with 7B, 13B, 34B and 70B parameters each. All models are trained on sequences of 16k tokens and show improvements on inputs with up to 100k tokens. 7B, 13B and 70B Code Llama and Code Llama - Instruct variants support infilling based on surrounding content. Code Llama reaches state-of-the-art performance among open models on several code benchmarks, with scores of up to 67% and 65% on HumanEval and MBPP, respectively. Notably, Code Llama - Python 7B outperforms Llama 2 70B on HumanEval and MBPP, and all our models outperform every other publicly available model on MultiPL-E. We release Code Llama under a permissive license that allows for both research and commercial use.
Recent advancements in language models have significantly enhanced performance in multiple speech-related tasks. Existing speech language models typically utilize task-dependent prompt tokens to unify various speech tasks in a single model. However, this design omits the intrinsic connections between different speech tasks, which can potentially boost the performance of each task. In this work, we propose a novel decoder-only speech language model, SpeechComposer, that can unify common speech tasks by composing a fixed set of prompt tokens. Built upon four primary tasks -- speech synthesis, speech recognition, speech language modeling, and text language modeling -- SpeechComposer can easily extend to more speech tasks via compositions of well-designed prompt tokens, like voice conversion and speech enhancement. The unification of prompt tokens also makes it possible for knowledge sharing among different speech tasks in a more structured manner. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed SpeechComposer can improve the performance of both primary tasks and composite tasks, showing the effectiveness of the shared prompt tokens. Remarkably, the unified decoder-only model achieves a comparable and even better performance than the baselines which are expert models designed for single tasks.
Diffusion models (DMs) have shown great potential for high-quality image synthesis. However, when it comes to producing images with complex scenes, how to properly describe both image global structures and object details remains a challenging task. In this paper, we present Frido, a Feature Pyramid Diffusion model performing a multi-scale coarse-to-fine denoising process for image synthesis. Our model decomposes an input image into scale-dependent vector quantized features, followed by a coarse-to-fine gating for producing image output. During the above multi-scale representation learning stage, additional input conditions like text, scene graph, or image layout can be further exploited. Thus, Frido can be also applied for conditional or cross-modality image synthesis. We conduct extensive experiments over various unconditioned and conditional image generation tasks, ranging from text-to-image synthesis, layout-to-image, scene-graph-to-image, to label-to-image. More specifically, we achieved state-of-the-art FID scores on five benchmarks, namely layout-to-image on COCO and OpenImages, scene-graph-to-image on COCO and Visual Genome, and label-to-image on COCO. Code is available at //github.com/davidhalladay/Frido.
Images can convey rich semantics and induce various emotions in viewers. Recently, with the rapid advancement of emotional intelligence and the explosive growth of visual data, extensive research efforts have been dedicated to affective image content analysis (AICA). In this survey, we will comprehensively review the development of AICA in the recent two decades, especially focusing on the state-of-the-art methods with respect to three main challenges -- the affective gap, perception subjectivity, and label noise and absence. We begin with an introduction to the key emotion representation models that have been widely employed in AICA and description of available datasets for performing evaluation with quantitative comparison of label noise and dataset bias. We then summarize and compare the representative approaches on (1) emotion feature extraction, including both handcrafted and deep features, (2) learning methods on dominant emotion recognition, personalized emotion prediction, emotion distribution learning, and learning from noisy data or few labels, and (3) AICA based applications. Finally, we discuss some challenges and promising research directions in the future, such as image content and context understanding, group emotion clustering, and viewer-image interaction.
Multi-agent influence diagrams (MAIDs) are a popular form of graphical model that, for certain classes of games, have been shown to offer key complexity and explainability advantages over traditional extensive form game (EFG) representations. In this paper, we extend previous work on MAIDs by introducing the concept of a MAID subgame, as well as subgame perfect and trembling hand perfect equilibrium refinements. We then prove several equivalence results between MAIDs and EFGs. Finally, we describe an open source implementation for reasoning about MAIDs and computing their equilibria.
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.
We propose to pre-train a unified language model for both autoencoding and partially autoregressive language modeling tasks using a novel training procedure, referred to as a pseudo-masked language model (PMLM). Given an input text with masked tokens, we rely on conventional masks to learn inter-relations between corrupted tokens and context via autoencoding, and pseudo masks to learn intra-relations between masked spans via partially autoregressive modeling. With well-designed position embeddings and self-attention masks, the context encodings are reused to avoid redundant computation. Moreover, conventional masks used for autoencoding provide global masking information, so that all the position embeddings are accessible in partially autoregressive language modeling. In addition, the two tasks pre-train a unified language model as a bidirectional encoder and a sequence-to-sequence decoder, respectively. Our experiments show that the unified language models pre-trained using PMLM achieve new state-of-the-art results on a wide range of natural language understanding and generation tasks across several widely used benchmarks.