Customized image generation is crucial for delivering personalized content based on user-provided image prompts, aligning large-scale text-to-image diffusion models with individual needs. However, existing models often overlook the relationships between customized objects in generated images. Instead, this work addresses that gap by focusing on relation-aware customized image generation, which aims to preserve the identities from image prompts while maintaining the predicate relations described in text prompts. Specifically, we introduce RelationBooth, a framework that disentangles identity and relation learning through a well-curated dataset. Our training data consists of relation-specific images, independent object images containing identity information, and text prompts to guide relation generation. Then, we propose two key modules to tackle the two main challenges: generating accurate and natural relations, especially when significant pose adjustments are required, and avoiding object confusion in cases of overlap. First, we introduce a keypoint matching loss that effectively guides the model in adjusting object poses closely tied to their relationships. Second, we incorporate local features from the image prompts to better distinguish between objects, preventing confusion in overlapping cases. Extensive results on three benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of RelationBooth in generating precise relations while preserving object identities across a diverse set of objects and relations. The source code and trained models will be made available to the public.
Editing real images using a pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) diffusion/flow model often involves inverting the image into its corresponding noise map. However, inversion by itself is typically insufficient for obtaining satisfactory results, and therefore many methods additionally intervene in the sampling process. Such methods achieve improved results but are not seamlessly transferable between model architectures. Here, we introduce FlowEdit, a text-based editing method for pre-trained T2I flow models, which is inversion-free, optimization-free and model agnostic. Our method constructs an ODE that directly maps between the source and target distributions (corresponding to the source and target text prompts) and achieves a lower transport cost than the inversion approach. This leads to state-of-the-art results, as we illustrate with Stable Diffusion 3 and FLUX. Code and examples are available on the project's webpage.
Estimating canopy height and its changes at meter resolution from satellite imagery is a significant challenge in computer vision with critical environmental applications. However, the lack of open-access datasets at this resolution hinders the reproducibility and evaluation of models. We introduce Open-Canopy, the first open-access, country-scale benchmark for very high-resolution (1.5 m) canopy height estimation, covering over 87,000 km$^2$ across France with 1.5 m resolution satellite imagery and aerial LiDAR data. Additionally, we present Open-Canopy-$\Delta$, a benchmark for canopy height change detection between images from different years at tree level-a challenging task for current computer vision models. We evaluate state-of-the-art architectures on these benchmarks, highlighting significant challenges and opportunities for improvement. Our datasets and code are publicly available at //github.com/fajwel/Open-Canopy.
Vision-language models (VLMs), serve as foundation models for multi-modal applications such as image captioning and text-to-image generation. Recent studies have highlighted limitations in VLM text encoders, particularly in areas like compositionality and semantic understanding, though the underlying reasons for these limitations remain unclear. In this work, we aim to address this gap by analyzing the syntactic information, one of the fundamental linguistic properties, encoded by the text encoders of VLMs. We perform a thorough analysis comparing VLMs with different objective functions, parameter size and training data size, and with uni-modal language models (ULMs) in their ability to encode syntactic knowledge. Our findings suggest that ULM text encoders acquire syntactic information more effectively than those in VLMs. The syntactic information learned by VLM text encoders is shaped primarily by the pre-training objective, which plays a more crucial role than other factors such as model architecture, model size, or the volume of pre-training data. Models exhibit different layer-wise trends where CLIP performance dropped across layers while for other models, middle layers are rich in encoding syntactic knowledge.
Document content extraction is crucial in computer vision, especially for meeting the high-quality data needs of large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technologies. However, current document parsing methods suffer from significant limitations in terms of diversity and comprehensive evaluation. To address these challenges, we introduce OmniDocBench, a novel multi-source benchmark designed to advance automated document content extraction. OmniDocBench includes a meticulously curated and annotated high-quality evaluation dataset comprising nine diverse document types, such as academic papers, textbooks, slides, among others. Our benchmark provides a flexible and comprehensive evaluation framework with 19 layout category labels and 14 attribute labels, enabling multi-level assessments across entire datasets, individual modules, or specific data types. Using OmniDocBench, we perform an exhaustive comparative analysis of existing modular pipelines and multimodal end-to-end methods, highlighting their limitations in handling document diversity and ensuring fair evaluation. OmniDocBench establishes a robust, diverse, and fair evaluation standard for the document content extraction field, offering crucial insights for future advancements and fostering the development of document parsing technologies. The codes and dataset is available in //github.com/opendatalab/OmniDocBench.
Diffusion models have shown unprecedented success in the task of text-to-image generation. While these models are capable of generating high-quality and realistic images, the complexity of sequential denoising has raised societal concerns regarding high computational demands and energy consumption. In response, various efforts have been made to improve inference efficiency. However, most of the existing efforts have taken a fixed approach with neural network simplification or text prompt optimization. Are the quality improvements from all denoising computations equally perceivable to humans? We observed that images from different text prompts may require different computational efforts given the desired content. The observation motivates us to present BudgetFusion, a novel model that suggests the most perceptually efficient number of diffusion steps before a diffusion model starts to generate an image. This is achieved by predicting multi-level perceptual metrics relative to diffusion steps. With the popular Stable Diffusion as an example, we conduct both numerical analyses and user studies. Our experiments show that BudgetFusion saves up to five seconds per prompt without compromising perceptual similarity. We hope this work can initiate efforts toward answering a core question: how much do humans perceptually gain from images created by a generative model, per watt of energy?
Customizing diffusion models to generate identity-preserving images from user-provided reference images is an intriguing new problem. The prevalent approaches typically require training on extensive domain-specific images to achieve identity preservation, which lacks flexibility across different use cases. To address this issue, we exploit classifier guidance, a training-free technique that steers diffusion models using an existing classifier, for personalized image generation. Our study shows that based on a recent rectified flow framework, the major limitation of vanilla classifier guidance in requiring a special classifier can be resolved with a simple fixed-point solution, allowing flexible personalization with off-the-shelf image discriminators. Moreover, its solving procedure proves to be stable when anchored to a reference flow trajectory, with a convergence guarantee. The derived method is implemented on rectified flow with different off-the-shelf image discriminators, delivering advantageous personalization results for human faces, live subjects, and certain objects. Code is available at //github.com/feifeiobama/RectifID.
Visual artifacts are often introduced into streamed video content, due to prevailing conditions during content production and delivery. Since these can degrade the quality of the user's experience, it is important to automatically and accurately detect them in order to enable effective quality measurement and enhancement. Existing detection methods often focus on a single type of artifact and/or determine the presence of an artifact through thresholding objective quality indices. Such approaches have been reported to offer inconsistent prediction performance and are also impractical for real-world applications where multiple artifacts co-exist and interact. In this paper, we propose a Multiple Visual Artifact Detector, MVAD, for video streaming which, for the first time, is able to detect multiple artifacts using a single framework that is not reliant on video quality assessment models. Our approach employs a new Artifact-aware Dynamic Feature Extractor (ADFE) to obtain artifact-relevant spatial features within each frame for multiple artifact types. The extracted features are further processed by a Recurrent Memory Vision Transformer (RMViT) module, which captures both short-term and long-term temporal information within the input video. The proposed network architecture is optimized in an end-to-end manner based on a new, large and diverse training database that is generated by simulating the video streaming pipeline and based on Adversarial Data Augmentation. This model has been evaluated on two video artifact databases, Maxwell and BVI-Artifact, and achieves consistent and improved prediction results for ten target visual artifacts when compared to seven existing single and multiple artifact detectors. The source code and training database will be available at //chenfeng-bristol.github.io/MVAD/.
Active speaker detection (ASD) in multimodal environments is crucial for various applications, from video conferencing to human-robot interaction. This paper introduces FabuLight-ASD, an advanced ASD model that integrates facial, audio, and body pose information to enhance detection accuracy and robustness. Our model builds upon the existing Light-ASD framework by incorporating human pose data, represented through skeleton graphs, which minimises computational overhead. Using the Wilder Active Speaker Detection (WASD) dataset, renowned for reliable face and body bounding box annotations, we demonstrate FabuLight-ASD's effectiveness in real-world scenarios. Achieving an overall mean average precision (mAP) of 94.3%, FabuLight-ASD outperforms Light-ASD, which has an overall mAP of 93.7% across various challenging scenarios. The incorporation of body pose information shows a particularly advantageous impact, with notable improvements in mAP observed in scenarios with speech impairment, face occlusion, and human voice background noise. Furthermore, efficiency analysis indicates only a modest increase in parameter count (27.3%) and multiply-accumulate operations (up to 2.4%), underscoring the model's efficiency and feasibility. These findings validate the efficacy of FabuLight-ASD in enhancing ASD performance through the integration of body pose data. FabuLight-ASD's code and model weights are available at //github.com/knowledgetechnologyuhh/FabuLight-ASD.
Deep learning-based low-light image enhancement (LLIE) is a task of leveraging deep neural networks to enhance the image illumination while keeping the image content unchanged. From the perspective of training data, existing methods complete the LLIE task driven by one of the following three data types: paired data, unpaired data and zero-reference data. Each type of these data-driven methods has its own advantages, e.g., zero-reference data-based methods have very low requirements on training data and can meet the human needs in many scenarios. In this paper, we leverage pure Gaussian noise to complete the LLIE task, which further reduces the requirements for training data in LLIE tasks and can be used as another alternative in practical use. Specifically, we propose Noise SElf-Regression (NoiSER) without access to any task-related data, simply learns a convolutional neural network equipped with an instance-normalization layer by taking a random noise image, $\mathcal{N}(0,\sigma^2)$ for each pixel, as both input and output for each training pair, and then the low-light image is fed to the trained network for predicting the normal-light image. Technically, an intuitive explanation for its effectiveness is as follows: 1) the self-regression reconstructs the contrast between adjacent pixels of the input image, 2) the instance-normalization layer may naturally remediate the overall magnitude/lighting of the input image, and 3) the $\mathcal{N}(0,\sigma^2)$ assumption for each pixel enforces the output image to follow the well-known gray-world hypothesis when the image size is big enough. Compared to current state-of-the-art LLIE methods with access to different task-related data, NoiSER is highly competitive in enhancement quality, yet with a much smaller model size, and much lower training and inference cost. Besides, NoiSER also excels in mitigating overexposure and handling joint tasks.
Joint image-text embedding is the bedrock for most Vision-and-Language (V+L) tasks, where multimodality inputs are jointly processed for visual and textual understanding. In this paper, we introduce UNITER, a UNiversal Image-TExt Representation, learned through large-scale pre-training over four image-text datasets (COCO, Visual Genome, Conceptual Captions, and SBU Captions), which can power heterogeneous downstream V+L tasks with joint multimodal embeddings. We design three pre-training tasks: Masked Language Modeling (MLM), Image-Text Matching (ITM), and Masked Region Modeling (MRM, with three variants). Different from concurrent work on multimodal pre-training that apply joint random masking to both modalities, we use conditioned masking on pre-training tasks (i.e., masked language/region modeling is conditioned on full observation of image/text). Comprehensive analysis shows that conditioned masking yields better performance than unconditioned masking. We also conduct a thorough ablation study to find an optimal setting for the combination of pre-training tasks. Extensive experiments show that UNITER achieves new state of the art across six V+L tasks (over nine datasets), including Visual Question Answering, Image-Text Retrieval, Referring Expression Comprehension, Visual Commonsense Reasoning, Visual Entailment, and NLVR2.