Infrared and visible image fusion aims at generating a fused image containing the intensity and detail information of source images, and the key issue is effectively measuring and integrating the complementary information of multi-modality images from the same scene. Existing methods mostly adopt a simple weight in the loss function to decide the information retention of each modality rather than adaptively measuring complementary information for different image pairs. In this study, we propose a multi-scale dual attention (MDA) framework for infrared and visible image fusion, which is designed to measure and integrate complementary information in both structure and loss function at the image and patch level. In our method, the residual downsample block decomposes source images into three scales first. Then, dual attention fusion block integrates complementary information and generates a spatial and channel attention map at each scale for feature fusion. Finally, the output image is reconstructed by the residual reconstruction block. Loss function consists of image-level, feature-level and patch-level three parts, of which the calculation of the image-level and patch-level two parts are based on the weights generated by the complementary information measurement. Indeed, to constrain the pixel intensity distribution between the output and infrared image, a style loss is added. Our fusion results perform robust and informative across different scenarios. Qualitative and quantitative results on two datasets illustrate that our method is able to preserve both thermal radiation and detailed information from two modalities and achieve comparable results compared with the other state-of-the-art methods. Ablation experiments show the effectiveness of our information integration architecture and adaptively measure complementary information retention in the loss function.
Recently, text-to-image diffusion models have demonstrated impressive ability to generate high-quality images conditioned on the textual input. However, these models struggle to accurately adhere to textual instructions regarding spatial layout information. While previous research has primarily focused on aligning cross-attention maps with layout conditions, they overlook the impact of the initialization noise on the layout guidance. To achieve better layout control, we propose leveraging a spatial-aware initialization noise during the denoising process. Specifically, we find that the inverted reference image with finite inversion steps contains valuable spatial awareness regarding the object's position, resulting in similar layouts in the generated images. Based on this observation, we develop an open-vocabulary framework to customize a spatial-aware initialization noise for each layout condition. Without modifying other modules except the initialization noise, our approach can be seamlessly integrated as a plug-and-play module within other training-free layout guidance frameworks. We evaluate our approach quantitatively and qualitatively on the available Stable Diffusion model and COCO dataset. Equipped with the spatial-aware latent initialization, our method significantly improves the effectiveness of layout guidance while preserving high-quality content.
Text-to-image generation models have recently achieved astonishing results in image quality, flexibility, and text alignment and are consequently employed in a fast-growing number of applications. Through improvements in multilingual abilities, a larger community now has access to this kind of technology. Yet, as we will show, multilingual models suffer similarly from (gender) biases as monolingual models. Furthermore, the natural expectation is that these models will provide similar results across languages, but this is not the case and there are important differences between languages. Thus, we propose a novel benchmark MAGBIG intending to foster research in multilingual models without gender bias. We investigate whether multilingual T2I models magnify gender bias with MAGBIG. To this end, we use multilingual prompts requesting portrait images of persons of a certain occupation or trait (using adjectives). Our results show not only that models deviate from the normative assumption that each gender should be equally likely to be generated, but that there are also big differences across languages. Furthermore, we investigate prompt engineering strategies, i.e. the use of indirect, neutral formulations, as a possible remedy for these biases. Unfortunately, they help only to a limited extent and result in worse text-to-image alignment. Consequently, this work calls for more research into diverse representations across languages in image generators.
The transition to 4th generation district heating creates a growing need for scalable, automated design tools that accurately capture the spatial and temporal details of heating network operation. This paper presents an automated design approach for the optimal design of district heating networks that combines scalable density-based topology optimization with a multi-period approach. In this way, temporal variations in demand, supply, and heat losses can be taken into account while optimizing the network design based on a nonlinear physics model. The transition of the automated design approach from worst-case to multi-period shows a design progression from separate branched networks to a single integrated meshed network topology connecting all producers. These integrated topologies emerge without imposing such structures a priori. They increase network connectivity, and allow for more flexible shifting of heat loads between different producers and heat consumers, resulting in more cost-effective use of heat. In a case study, this integrated design resulted in an increase in waste heat share of 42.8 % and a subsequent reduction in project cost of 17.9 %. We show how producer unavailability can be accounted for in the automated design at the cost of a 3.1 % increase in the cost of backup capacity. The resulting optimized network designs of this approach connect multiple low temperature heat sources in a single integrated network achieving high waste heat utilization and redundancy, highlighting the applicability of the approach to next-generation district heating networks.
The chain graph model admits both undirected and directed edges in one graph, where symmetric conditional dependencies are encoded via undirected edges and asymmetric causal relations are encoded via directed edges. Though frequently encountered in practice, the chain graph model has been largely under investigated in literature, possibly due to the lack of identifiability conditions between undirected and directed edges. In this paper, we first establish a set of novel identifiability conditions for the Gaussian chain graph model, exploiting a low rank plus sparse decomposition of the precision matrix. Further, an efficient learning algorithm is built upon the identifiability conditions to fully recover the chain graph structure. Theoretical analysis on the proposed method is conducted, assuring its asymptotic consistency in recovering the exact chain graph structure. The advantage of the proposed method is also supported by numerical experiments on both simulated examples and a real application on the Standard & Poor 500 index data.
Recent advancements in text-to-image models have significantly enhanced image generation capabilities, yet a notable gap of open-source models persists in bilingual or Chinese language support. To address this need, we present Taiyi-Diffusion-XL, a new Chinese and English bilingual text-to-image model which is developed by extending the capabilities of CLIP and Stable-Diffusion-XL through a process of bilingual continuous pre-training. This approach includes the efficient expansion of vocabulary by integrating the most frequently used Chinese characters into CLIP's tokenizer and embedding layers, coupled with an absolute position encoding expansion. Additionally, we enrich text prompts by large vision-language model, leading to better images captions and possess higher visual quality. These enhancements are subsequently applied to downstream text-to-image models. Our empirical results indicate that the developed CLIP model excels in bilingual image-text retrieval.Furthermore, the bilingual image generation capabilities of Taiyi-Diffusion-XL surpass previous models. This research leads to the development and open-sourcing of the Taiyi-Diffusion-XL model, representing a notable advancement in the field of image generation, particularly for Chinese language applications. This contribution is a step forward in addressing the need for more diverse language support in multimodal research. The model and demonstration are made publicly available at \href{//huggingface.co/IDEA-CCNL/Taiyi-Stable-Diffusion-XL-3.5B/}{this https URL}, fostering further research and collaboration in this domain.
Despite the recent emergence of video captioning models, how to generate the text description with specific entity names and fine-grained actions is far from being solved, which however has great applications such as basketball live text broadcast. In this paper, a new multimodal knowledge supported basketball benchmark for video captioning is proposed. Specifically, we construct a Multimodal Basketball Game Knowledge Graph (MbgKG) to provide knowledge beyond videos. Then, a Multimodal Basketball Game Video Captioning (MbgVC) dataset that contains 9 types of fine-grained shooting events and 286 players' knowledge (i.e., images and names) is constructed based on MbgKG. We develop a novel framework in the encoder-decoder form named Entity-Aware Captioner (EAC) for basketball live text broadcast. The temporal information in video is encoded by introducing the bi-directional GRU (Bi-GRU) module. And the multi-head self-attention module is utilized to model the relationships among the players and select the key players. Besides, we propose a new performance evaluation metric named Game Description Score (GDS), which measures not only the linguistic performance but also the accuracy of the names prediction. Extensive experiments on MbgVC dataset demonstrate that EAC effectively leverages external knowledge and outperforms advanced video captioning models. The proposed benchmark and corresponding codes will be publicly available soon.
As a scene graph compactly summarizes the high-level content of an image in a structured and symbolic manner, the similarity between scene graphs of two images reflects the relevance of their contents. Based on this idea, we propose a novel approach for image-to-image retrieval using scene graph similarity measured by graph neural networks. In our approach, graph neural networks are trained to predict the proxy image relevance measure, computed from human-annotated captions using a pre-trained sentence similarity model. We collect and publish the dataset for image relevance measured by human annotators to evaluate retrieval algorithms. The collected dataset shows that our method agrees well with the human perception of image similarity than other competitive baselines.
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.
Knowledge graphs capture interlinked information between entities and they represent an attractive source of structured information that can be harnessed for recommender systems. However, existing recommender engines use knowledge graphs by manually designing features, do not allow for end-to-end training, or provide poor scalability. Here we propose Knowledge Graph Convolutional Networks (KGCN), an end-to-end trainable framework that harnesses item relationships captured by the knowledge graph to provide better recommendations. Conceptually, KGCN computes user-specific item embeddings by first applying a trainable function that identifies important knowledge graph relations for a given user and then transforming the knowledge graph into a user-specific weighted graph. Then, KGCN applies a graph convolutional neural network that computes an embedding of an item node by propagating and aggregating knowledge graph neighborhood information. Moreover, to provide better inductive bias KGCN uses label smoothness (LS), which provides regularization over edge weights and we prove that it is equivalent to label propagation scheme on a graph. Finally, We unify KGCN and LS regularization, and present a scalable minibatch implementation for KGCN-LS model. Experiments show that KGCN-LS outperforms strong baselines in four datasets. KGCN-LS also achieves great performance in sparse scenarios and is highly scalable with respect to the knowledge graph size.
High spectral dimensionality and the shortage of annotations make hyperspectral image (HSI) classification a challenging problem. Recent studies suggest that convolutional neural networks can learn discriminative spatial features, which play a paramount role in HSI interpretation. However, most of these methods ignore the distinctive spectral-spatial characteristic of hyperspectral data. In addition, a large amount of unlabeled data remains an unexploited gold mine for efficient data use. Therefore, we proposed an integration of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and probabilistic graphical models for HSI classification. Specifically, we used a spectral-spatial generator and a discriminator to identify land cover categories of hyperspectral cubes. Moreover, to take advantage of a large amount of unlabeled data, we adopted a conditional random field to refine the preliminary classification results generated by GANs. Experimental results obtained using two commonly studied datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieved encouraging classification accuracy using a small number of data for training.