Chengzhi Cao

Kunyu Wang, Xueyang Fu, Chengzhi Cao et al.

Current image de-raining methods primarily learn from a limited dataset, leading to inadequate performance in varied real-world rainy conditions. To tackle this, we introduce a new framework that enables networks to progressively expand their de-raining knowledge base by tapping into a growing pool of datasets, significantly boosting their adaptability. Drawing inspiration from the human brain's ability to continuously absorb and generalize from ongoing experiences, our approach borrow the mechanism of the complementary learning system. Specifically, we first deploy Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to capture and retain the unique features of new data, mirroring the hippocampus's role in learning and memory. Then, the de-raining network is trained with both existing and GAN-synthesized data, mimicking the process of hippocampal replay and interleaved learning. Furthermore, we employ knowledge distillation with the replayed data to replicate the synergy between the neocortex's activity patterns triggered by hippocampal replays and the pre-existing neocortical knowledge. This comprehensive framework empowers the de-raining network to amass knowledge from various datasets, continually enhancing its performance on previously unseen rainy scenes. Our testing on three benchmark de-raining networks confirms the framework's effectiveness. It not only facilitates continuous knowledge accumulation across six datasets but also surpasses state-of-the-art methods in generalizing to new real-world scenarios.

Kunyu Wang, Xueyang Fu, Yuanfei Bao et al.

Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) aims to online adapt a pre-trained model to changing environments during inference. Most existing methods focus on exploiting target data, while overlooking another crucial source of information, the pre-trained weights, which encode underutilized domain-invariant priors. This paper takes the geometric attributes of pre-trained weights as a starting point, systematically analyzing three key components: magnitude, absolute angle, and pairwise angular structure. We find that the pairwise angular structure remains stable across diverse corrupted domains and encodes domain-invariant semantic information, suggesting it should be preserved during adaptation. Based on this insight, we propose PAID (Pairwise Angular-Invariant Decomposition), a prior-driven CTTA method that decomposes weight into magnitude and direction, and introduces a learnable orthogonal matrix via Householder reflections to globally rotate direction while preserving the pairwise angular structure. During adaptation, only the magnitudes and the orthogonal matrices are updated. PAID achieves consistent improvements over recent SOTA methods on four widely used CTTA benchmarks, demonstrating that preserving pairwise angular structure offers a simple yet effective principle for CTTA.

Jingru Yang, Chengzhi Cao, Chentianye Xu et al.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) face inherent challenges in image matting, particularly in preserving fine structural details. ViTs, with their global receptive field enabled by the self-attention mechanism, often lose local details such as hair strands. Conversely, CNNs, constrained by their local receptive field, rely on deeper layers to approximate global context but struggle to retain fine structures at greater depths. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel Morpho-Aware Global Attention (MAGA) mechanism, designed to effectively capture the morphology of fine structures. MAGA employs Tetris-like convolutional patterns to align the local shapes of fine structures, ensuring optimal local correspondence while maintaining sensitivity to morphological details. The extracted local morphology information is used as query embeddings, which are projected onto global key embeddings to emphasize local details in a broader context. Subsequently, by projecting onto value embeddings, MAGA seamlessly integrates these emphasized morphological details into a unified global structure. This approach enables MAGA to simultaneously focus on local morphology and unify these details into a coherent whole, effectively preserving fine structures. Extensive experiments show that our MAGA-based ViT achieves significant performance gains, outperforming state-of-the-art methods across two benchmarks with average improvements of 4.3% in SAD and 39.5% in MSE.