Recent work has studied text-to-audio synthesis using large amounts of paired text-audio data. However, audio recordings with high-quality text annotations can be difficult to acquire. In this work, we approach text-to-audio synthesis using unlabeled videos and pretrained language-vision models. We propose to learn the desired text-audio correspondence by leveraging the visual modality as a bridge. We train a conditional diffusion model to generate the audio track of a video, given a video frame encoded by a pretrained contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP) model. At test time, we first explore performing a zero-shot modality transfer and condition the diffusion model with a CLIP-encoded text query. However, we observe a noticeable performance drop with respect to image queries. To close this gap, we further adopt a pretrained diffusion prior model to generate a CLIP image embedding given a CLIP text embedding. Our results show the effectiveness of the proposed method, and that the pretrained diffusion prior can reduce the modality transfer gap. While we focus on text-to-audio synthesis, the proposed model can also generate audio from image queries, and it shows competitive performance against a state-of-the-art image-to-audio synthesis model in a subjective listening test. This study offers a new direction of approaching text-to-audio synthesis that leverages the naturally-occurring audio-visual correspondence in videos and the power of pretrained language-vision models.
Recently, learned image compression has achieved remarkable performance. The entropy model, which estimates the distribution of the latent representation, plays a crucial role in boosting rate-distortion performance. However, most entropy models only capture correlations in one dimension, while the latent representation contain channel-wise, local spatial, and global spatial correlations. To tackle this issue, we propose the Multi-Reference Entropy Model (MEM) and the advanced version, MEM$^+$. These models capture the different types of correlations present in latent representation. Specifically, We first divide the latent representation into slices. When decoding the current slice, we use previously decoded slices as context and employ the attention map of the previously decoded slice to predict global correlations in the current slice. To capture local contexts, we introduce two enhanced checkerboard context capturing techniques that avoids performance degradation. Based on MEM and MEM$^+$, we propose image compression models MLIC and MLIC$^+$. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that our MLIC and MLIC$^+$ models achieve state-of-the-art performance, reducing BD-rate by $8.05\%$ and $11.39\%$ on the Kodak dataset compared to VTM-17.0 when measured in PSNR. Our code will be available at //github.com/JiangWeibeta/MLIC.
We propose a novel method, LoLep, which regresses Locally-Learned planes from a single RGB image to represent scenes accurately, thus generating better novel views. Without the depth information, regressing appropriate plane locations is a challenging problem. To solve this issue, we pre-partition the disparity space into bins and design a disparity sampler to regress local offsets for multiple planes in each bin. However, only using such a sampler makes the network not convergent; we further propose two optimizing strategies that combine with different disparity distributions of datasets and propose an occlusion-aware reprojection loss as a simple yet effective geometric supervision technique. We also introduce a self-attention mechanism to improve occlusion inference and present a Block-Sampling Self-Attention (BS-SA) module to address the problem of applying self-attention to large feature maps. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and generate state-of-the-art results on different datasets. Compared to MINE, our approach has an LPIPS reduction of 4.8%-9.0% and an RV reduction of 73.9%-83.5%. We also evaluate the performance on real-world images and demonstrate the benefits.
Towards sufficient music searching, it is vital to form a complete set of labels for each song. However, current solutions fail to resolve it as they cannot produce diverse enough mappings to make up for the information missed by the gold labels. Based on the observation that such missing information may already be presented in user comments, we propose to study the automated music labeling in an essential but under-explored setting, where the model is required to harvest more diverse and valid labels from the users' comments given limited gold labels. To this end, we design an iterative framework (DiVa) to harvest more $\underline{\text{Di}}$verse and $\underline{\text{Va}}$lid labels from user comments for music. The framework makes a classifier able to form complete sets of labels for songs via pseudo-labels inferred from pre-trained classifiers and a novel joint score function. The experiment on a densely annotated testing set reveals the superiority of the Diva over state-of-the-art solutions in producing more diverse labels missed by the gold labels. We hope our work can inspire future research on automated music labeling.
Self-supervised sound source localization is usually challenged by the modality inconsistency. In recent studies, contrastive learning based strategies have shown promising to establish such a consistent correspondence between audio and sound sources in visual scenarios. Unfortunately, the insufficient attention to the heterogeneity influence in the different modality features still limits this scheme to be further improved, which also becomes the motivation of our work. In this study, an Induction Network is proposed to bridge the modality gap more effectively. By decoupling the gradients of visual and audio modalities, the discriminative visual representations of sound sources can be learned with the designed Induction Vector in a bootstrap manner, which also enables the audio modality to be aligned with the visual modality consistently. In addition to a visual weighted contrastive loss, an adaptive threshold selection strategy is introduced to enhance the robustness of the Induction Network. Substantial experiments conducted on SoundNet-Flickr and VGG-Sound Source datasets have demonstrated a superior performance compared to other state-of-the-art works in different challenging scenarios. The code is available at //github.com/Tahy1/AVIN
DAVIS camera, streaming two complementary sensing modalities of asynchronous events and frames, has gradually been used to address major object detection challenges (e.g., fast motion blur and low-light). However, how to effectively leverage rich temporal cues and fuse two heterogeneous visual streams remains a challenging endeavor. To address this challenge, we propose a novel streaming object detector with Transformer, namely SODFormer, which first integrates events and frames to continuously detect objects in an asynchronous manner. Technically, we first build a large-scale multimodal neuromorphic object detection dataset (i.e., PKU-DAVIS-SOD) over 1080.1k manual labels. Then, we design a spatiotemporal Transformer architecture to detect objects via an end-to-end sequence prediction problem, where the novel temporal Transformer module leverages rich temporal cues from two visual streams to improve the detection performance. Finally, an asynchronous attention-based fusion module is proposed to integrate two heterogeneous sensing modalities and take complementary advantages from each end, which can be queried at any time to locate objects and break through the limited output frequency from synchronized frame-based fusion strategies. The results show that the proposed SODFormer outperforms four state-of-the-art methods and our eight baselines by a significant margin. We also show that our unifying framework works well even in cases where the conventional frame-based camera fails, e.g., high-speed motion and low-light conditions. Our dataset and code can be available at //github.com/dianzl/SODFormer.
Contemporary real-time video communication systems, such as WebRTC, use an adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithm to assure high-quality and low-delay services, e.g., promptly adjusting video bitrate according to the instantaneous network bandwidth. However, target bitrate decisions in the network and bitrate control in the codec are typically incoordinated and simply ignoring the effect of inappropriate resolution and frame rate settings also leads to compromised results in bitrate control, thus devastatingly deteriorating the quality of experience (QoE). To tackle these challenges, Mamba, an end-to-end multi-dimensional ABR algorithm is proposed, which utilizes multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to maximize the user's QoE by adaptively and collaboratively adjusting encoding factors including the quantization parameters (QP), resolution, and frame rate based on observed states such as network conditions and video complexity information in a video conferencing system. We also introduce curriculum learning to improve the training efficiency of MARL. Both the in-lab and real-world evaluation results demonstrate the remarkable efficacy of Mamba.
Quantization has become a mainstream compression technique for reducing model size, computational requirements, and energy consumption for modern deep neural networks (DNNs). With the improved numerical support in recent hardware, including multiple variants of integer and floating point, mixed-precision quantization has become necessary to achieve high-quality results with low model cost. Prior mixed-precision quantization methods have performed a post-training quantization search, which compromises on accuracy, or a differentiable quantization search, which leads to high memory usage from branching. Therefore, we propose the first one-shot mixed-precision quantization search that eliminates the need for retraining in both integer and low-precision floating point models. We evaluate our floating-point and integer quantization search (FLIQS) on multiple convolutional networks and vision transformer models to discover Pareto-optimal models. Our approach discovers models that improve upon uniform precision, manual mixed-precision, and recent integer quantization search methods. With the proposed integer quantization search, we increase the accuracy of ResNet-18 on ImageNet by 1.31% points and ResNet-50 by 0.90% points with equivalent model cost over previous methods. Additionally, for the first time, we explore a novel mixed-precision floating-point search and improve MobileNetV2 by up to 0.98% points compared to prior state-of-the-art FP8 models. Finally, we extend FLIQS to simultaneously search a joint quantization and neural architecture space and improve the ImageNet accuracy by 2.69% points with similar model cost on a MobileNetV2 search space.
We propose MM-Vet, an evaluation benchmark that examines large multimodal models (LMMs) on complicated multimodal tasks. Recent LMMs have shown various intriguing abilities, such as solving math problems written on the blackboard, reasoning about events and celebrities in news images, and explaining visual jokes. Rapid model advancements pose challenges to evaluation benchmark development. Problems include: (1) How to systematically structure and evaluate the complicated multimodal tasks; (2) How to design evaluation metrics that work well across question and answer types; and (3) How to give model insights beyond a simple performance ranking. To this end, we present MM-Vet, designed based on the insight that the intriguing ability to solve complicated tasks is often achieved by a generalist model being able to integrate different core vision-language (VL) capabilities. MM-Vet defines 6 core VL capabilities and examines the 16 integrations of interest derived from the capability combination. For evaluation metrics, we propose an LLM-based evaluator for open-ended outputs. The evaluator enables the evaluation across different question types and answer styles, resulting in a unified scoring metric. We evaluate representative LMMs on MM-Vet, providing insights into the capabilities of different LMM system paradigms and models. Code and data are available at //github.com/yuweihao/MM-Vet.
Most existing event extraction (EE) methods merely extract event arguments within the sentence scope. However, such sentence-level EE methods struggle to handle soaring amounts of documents from emerging applications, such as finance, legislation, health, etc., where event arguments always scatter across different sentences, and even multiple such event mentions frequently co-exist in the same document. To address these challenges, we propose a novel end-to-end model, Doc2EDAG, which can generate an entity-based directed acyclic graph to fulfill the document-level EE (DEE) effectively. Moreover, we reformalize a DEE task with the no-trigger-words design to ease the document-level event labeling. To demonstrate the effectiveness of Doc2EDAG, we build a large-scale real-world dataset consisting of Chinese financial announcements with the challenges mentioned above. Extensive experiments with comprehensive analyses illustrate the superiority of Doc2EDAG over state-of-the-art methods. Data and codes can be found at //github.com/dolphin-zs/Doc2EDAG.
We construct targeted audio adversarial examples on automatic speech recognition. Given any audio waveform, we can produce another that is over 99.9% similar, but transcribes as any phrase we choose (at a rate of up to 50 characters per second). We apply our iterative optimization-based attack to Mozilla's implementation DeepSpeech end-to-end, and show it has a 100% success rate. The feasibility of this attack introduce a new domain to study adversarial examples.