Affective Image Manipulation (AIM) seeks to modify user-provided images to evoke specific emotional responses. This task is inherently complex due to its twofold objective: significantly evoking the intended emotion, while preserving the original image composition. Existing AIM methods primarily adjust color and style, often failing to elicit precise and profound emotional shifts. Drawing on psychological insights, we extend AIM by incorporating content modifications to enhance emotional impact. We introduce EmoEdit, a novel two-stage framework comprising emotion attribution and image editing. In the emotion attribution stage, we leverage a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to create hierarchies of semantic factors that represent abstract emotions. In the image editing stage, the VLM identifies the most relevant factors for the provided image, and guides a generative editing model to perform affective modifications. A ranking technique that we developed selects the best edit, balancing between emotion fidelity and structure integrity. To validate EmoEdit, we assembled a dataset of 416 images, categorized into positive, negative, and neutral classes. Our method is evaluated both qualitatively and quantitatively, demonstrating superior performance compared to existing state-of-the-art techniques. Additionally, we showcase EmoEdit's potential in various manipulation tasks, including emotion-oriented and semantics-oriented editing.
System Verilog Assertion (SVA) formulation -- a critical yet complex task is a prerequisite in the Assertion Based Verification (ABV) process. Traditionally, SVA formulation involves expert-driven interpretation of specifications, which is time-consuming and prone to human error. Recently, LLM-informed automatic assertion generation is gaining interest. We designed a novel framework called ChIRAAG, based on OpenAI GPT4, to generate SVA from natural language specifications of a design. ChIRAAG constitutes the systematic breakdown of design specifications into a standardized format, further generating assertions from formatted specifications using LLM. Furthermore, we used few test cases to validate the LLM-generated assertions. Automatic feedback of log messages from the simulation tool to the LLM ensures that the framework can generate correct SVAs. In our experiments, only 27% of LLM-generated raw assertions had errors, which was rectified in few iterations based on the simulation log. Our results on OpenTitan designs show that LLMs can streamline and assist engineers in the assertion generation process, reshaping verification workflows.
Named entity recognition (NER) stands as a fundamental and pivotal task within the realm of Natural Language Processing. Particularly within the domain of Biomedical Method NER, this task presents notable challenges, stemming from the continual influx of domain-specific terminologies in scholarly literature. Current research in Biomedical Method (BioMethod) NER suffers from a scarcity of resources, primarily attributed to the intricate nature of methodological concepts, which necessitate a profound understanding for precise delineation. In this study, we propose a novel dataset for biomedical method entity recognition, employing an automated BioMethod entity recognition and information retrieval system to assist human annotation. Furthermore, we comprehensively explore a range of conventional and contemporary open-domain NER methodologies, including the utilization of cutting-edge large-scale language models (LLMs) customised to our dataset. Our empirical findings reveal that the large parameter counts of language models surprisingly inhibit the effective assimilation of entity extraction patterns pertaining to biomedical methods. Remarkably, the approach, leveraging the modestly sized ALBERT model (only 11MB), in conjunction with conditional random fields (CRF), achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance.
SLAM systems based on Gaussian Splatting have garnered attention due to their capabilities for rapid real-time rendering and high-fidelity mapping. However, current Gaussian Splatting SLAM systems usually struggle with large scene representation and lack effective loop closure detection. To address these issues, we introduce NGM-SLAM, the first 3DGS based SLAM system that utilizes neural radiance field submaps for progressive scene expression, effectively integrating the strengths of neural radiance fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting. We utilize neural radiance field submaps as supervision and achieve high-quality scene expression and online loop closure adjustments through Gaussian rendering of fused submaps. Our results on multiple real-world scenes and large-scale scene datasets demonstrate that our method can achieve accurate hole filling and high-quality scene expression, supporting monocular, stereo, and RGB-D inputs, and achieving state-of-the-art scene reconstruction and tracking performance.
The ascension of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in various fields necessitates effective UAV image segmentation, which faces challenges due to the dynamic perspectives of UAV-captured images. Traditional segmentation algorithms falter as they cannot accurately mimic the complexity of UAV perspectives, and the cost of obtaining multi-perspective labeled datasets is prohibitive. To address these issues, we introduce the PPTFormer, a novel \textbf{P}seudo Multi-\textbf{P}erspective \textbf{T}rans\textbf{former} network that revolutionizes UAV image segmentation. Our approach circumvents the need for actual multi-perspective data by creating pseudo perspectives for enhanced multi-perspective learning. The PPTFormer network boasts Perspective Decomposition, novel Perspective Prototypes, and a specialized encoder and decoder that together achieve superior segmentation results through Pseudo Multi-Perspective Attention (PMP Attention) and fusion. Our experiments demonstrate that PPTFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance across five UAV segmentation datasets, confirming its capability to effectively simulate UAV flight perspectives and significantly advance segmentation precision. This work presents a pioneering leap in UAV scene understanding and sets a new benchmark for future developments in semantic segmentation.
Vision Language Models (VLMs) have achieved impressive performance in 2D image understanding, however they are still struggling with spatial understanding which is the foundation of Embodied AI. In this paper, we propose SpatialBot for better spatial understanding by feeding both RGB and depth images. Additionally, we have constructed the SpatialQA dataset, which involves multi-level depth-related questions to train VLMs for depth understanding. Finally, we present SpatialBench to comprehensively evaluate VLMs' capabilities in spatial understanding at different levels. Extensive experiments on our spatial-understanding benchmark, general VLM benchmarks and Embodied AI tasks, demonstrate the remarkable improvements of SpatialBot trained on SpatialQA. The model, code and data are available at //github.com/BAAI-DCAI/SpatialBot.
Extracting Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) on video data poses unique challenges due to the additional temporal dimension. In the context of videos, INRs have predominantly relied on a frame-only parameterization, which sacrifices the spatiotemporal continuity observed in pixel-level (spatial) representations. To mitigate this, we introduce Polynomial Neural Representation for Videos (PNeRV), a parameter-wise efficient, patch-wise INR for videos that preserves spatiotemporal continuity. PNeRV leverages the modeling capabilities of Polynomial Neural Networks to perform the modulation of a continuous spatial (patch) signal with a continuous time (frame) signal. We further propose a custom Hierarchical Patch-wise Spatial Sampling Scheme that ensures spatial continuity while retaining parameter efficiency. We also employ a carefully designed Positional Embedding methodology to further enhance PNeRV's performance. Our extensive experimentation demonstrates that PNeRV outperforms the baselines in conventional Implicit Neural Representation tasks like compression along with downstream applications that require spatiotemporal continuity in the underlying representation. PNeRV not only addresses the challenges posed by video data in the realm of INRs but also opens new avenues for advanced video processing and analysis.
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.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are information processing architectures for signals supported on graphs. They are presented here as generalizations of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in which individual layers contain banks of graph convolutional filters instead of banks of classical convolutional filters. Otherwise, GNNs operate as CNNs. Filters are composed with pointwise nonlinearities and stacked in layers. It is shown that GNN architectures exhibit equivariance to permutation and stability to graph deformations. These properties provide a measure of explanation respecting the good performance of GNNs that can be observed empirically. It is also shown that if graphs converge to a limit object, a graphon, GNNs converge to a corresponding limit object, a graphon neural network. This convergence justifies the transferability of GNNs across networks with different number of nodes.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have recently achieved impressive results for many real-world applications, and many GAN variants have emerged with improvements in sample quality and training stability. However, they have not been well visualized or understood. How does a GAN represent our visual world internally? What causes the artifacts in GAN results? How do architectural choices affect GAN learning? Answering such questions could enable us to develop new insights and better models. In this work, we present an analytic framework to visualize and understand GANs at the unit-, object-, and scene-level. We first identify a group of interpretable units that are closely related to object concepts using a segmentation-based network dissection method. Then, we quantify the causal effect of interpretable units by measuring the ability of interventions to control objects in the output. We examine the contextual relationship between these units and their surroundings by inserting the discovered object concepts into new images. We show several practical applications enabled by our framework, from comparing internal representations across different layers, models, and datasets, to improving GANs by locating and removing artifact-causing units, to interactively manipulating objects in a scene. We provide open source interpretation tools to help researchers and practitioners better understand their GAN models.
We present Generative Adversarial Capsule Network (CapsuleGAN), a framework that uses capsule networks (CapsNets) instead of the standard convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as discriminators within the generative adversarial network (GAN) setting, while modeling image data. We provide guidelines for designing CapsNet discriminators and the updated GAN objective function, which incorporates the CapsNet margin loss, for training CapsuleGAN models. We show that CapsuleGAN outperforms convolutional-GAN at modeling image data distribution on the MNIST dataset of handwritten digits, evaluated on the generative adversarial metric and at semi-supervised image classification.