Jie Hu

Yun Zhang, Wei Li, Simiao Li et al.

Knowledge distillation (KD) compresses deep neural networks by transferring task-related knowledge from cumbersome pre-trained teacher models to compact student models. However, current KD methods for super-resolution (SR) networks overlook the nature of SR task that the outputs of the teacher model are noisy approximations to the ground-truth distribution of high-quality images (GT), which shades the teacher model's knowledge to result in limited KD effects. To utilize the teacher model beyond the GT upper-bound, we present the Data Upcycling Knowledge Distillation (DUKD), to transfer the teacher model's knowledge to the student model through the upcycled in-domain data derived from training data. Besides, we impose label consistency regularization to KD for SR by the paired invertible augmentations to improve the student model's performance and robustness. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the DUKD method significantly outperforms previous arts on several SR tasks.

Jiacheng Wei, Guosheng Lin, Henghui Ding et al.

Point cloud datasets often suffer from inadequate sample sizes in comparison to image datasets, making data augmentation challenging. While traditional methods, like rigid transformations and scaling, have limited potential in increasing dataset diversity due to their constraints on altering individual sample shapes, we introduce the Biharmonic Augmentation (BA) method. BA is a novel and efficient data augmentation technique that diversifies point cloud data by imposing smooth non-rigid deformations on existing 3D structures. This approach calculates biharmonic coordinates for the deformation function and learns diverse deformation prototypes. Utilizing a CoefNet, our method predicts coefficients to amalgamate these prototypes, ensuring comprehensive deformation. Moreover, we present AdvTune, an advanced online augmentation system that integrates adversarial training. This system synergistically refines the CoefNet and the classification network, facilitating the automated creation of adaptive shape deformations contingent on the learner status. Comprehensive experimental analysis validates the superiority of Biharmonic Augmentation, showcasing notable performance improvements over prevailing point cloud augmentation techniques across varied network designs.

Dengsheng Chen, Jie Hu, Xiaoming Wei et al.

Incorporating a temporal dimension into pretrained image diffusion models for video generation is a prevalent approach. However, this method is computationally demanding and necessitates large-scale video datasets. More critically, the heterogeneity between image and video datasets often results in catastrophic forgetting of the image expertise. Recent attempts to directly extract video snippets from image diffusion models have somewhat mitigated these problems. Nevertheless, these methods can only generate brief video clips with simple movements and fail to capture fine-grained motion or non-grid deformation. In this paper, we propose a novel Zero-Shot video Sampling algorithm, denoted as $\mathcal{ZS}^2$, capable of directly sampling high-quality video clips from existing image synthesis methods, such as Stable Diffusion, without any training or optimization. Specifically, $\mathcal{ZS}^2$ utilizes the dependency noise model and temporal momentum attention to ensure content consistency and animation coherence, respectively. This ability enables it to excel in related tasks, such as conditional and context-specialized video generation and instruction-guided video editing. Experimental results demonstrate that $\mathcal{ZS}^2$ achieves state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot video generation, occasionally outperforming recent supervised methods. Homepage: \url{https://densechen.github.io/zss/}.

Mingjian Zhu, Hanting Chen, Mouxiao Huang et al.

The misuse of AI imagery can have harmful societal effects, prompting the creation of detectors to combat issues like the spread of fake news. Existing methods can effectively detect images generated by seen generators, but it is challenging to detect those generated by unseen generators. They do not concentrate on amplifying the output discrepancy when detectors process real versus fake images. This results in a close output distribution of real and fake samples, increasing classification difficulty in detecting unseen generators. This paper addresses the unseen-generator detection problem by considering this task from the perspective of anomaly detection and proposes an adversarial teacher-student discrepancy-aware framework. Our method encourages smaller output discrepancies between the student and the teacher models for real images while aiming for larger discrepancies for fake images. We employ adversarial learning to train a feature augmenter, which promotes smaller discrepancies between teacher and student networks when the inputs are fake images. Our method has achieved state-of-the-art on public benchmarks, and the visualization results show that a large output discrepancy is maintained when faced with various types of generators.

Junbo Qiao, Jincheng Liao, Wei Li et al.

State Space Models (SSM), such as Mamba, have shown strong representation ability in modeling long-range dependency with linear complexity, achieving successful applications from high-level to low-level vision tasks. However, SSM's sequential nature necessitates multiple scans in different directions to compensate for the loss of spatial dependency when unfolding the image into a 1D sequence. This multi-direction scanning strategy significantly increases the computation overhead and is unbearable for high-resolution image processing. To address this problem, we propose a novel Hierarchical Mamba network, namely, Hi-Mamba, for image super-resolution (SR). Hi-Mamba consists of two key designs: (1) The Hierarchical Mamba Block (HMB) assembled by a Local SSM (L-SSM) and a Region SSM (R-SSM) both with the single-direction scanning, aggregates multi-scale representations to enhance the context modeling ability. (2) The Direction Alternation Hierarchical Mamba Group (DA-HMG) allocates the isomeric single-direction scanning into cascading HMBs to enrich the spatial relationship modeling. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of Hi-Mamba across five benchmark datasets for efficient SR. For example, Hi-Mamba achieves a significant PSNR improvement of 0.29 dB on Manga109 for $\times3$ SR, compared to the strong lightweight MambaIR.

Junbo Qiao, Wei Li, Haizhen Xie et al.

Transformer is leading a trend in the field of image processing. Despite the great success that existing lightweight image processing transformers have achieved, they are tailored to FLOPs or parameters reduction, rather than practical inference acceleration. In this paper, we present a latency-aware image processing transformer, termed LIPT. We devise the low-latency proportion LIPT block that substitutes memory-intensive operators with the combination of self-attention and convolutions to achieve practical speedup. Specifically, we propose a novel non-volatile sparse masking self-attention (NVSM-SA) that utilizes a pre-computing sparse mask to capture contextual information from a larger window with no extra computation overload. Besides, a high-frequency reparameterization module (HRM) is proposed to make LIPT block reparameterization friendly, which improves the model's detail reconstruction capability. Extensive experiments on multiple image processing tasks (e.g., image super-resolution (SR), JPEG artifact reduction, and image denoising) demonstrate the superiority of LIPT on both latency and PSNR. LIPT achieves real-time GPU inference with state-of-the-art performance on multiple image SR benchmarks.

Jie Hu, Shengnan Wang, Yutong He et al.

Large language models (LLMs) with extended context windows have become increasingly prevalent for tackling complex tasks. However, the substantial Key-Value (KV) cache required for long-context LLMs poses significant deployment challenges. Existing approaches either discard potentially critical information needed for future generations or offer limited efficiency gains due to high computational overhead. In this paper, we introduce Chelsea, a simple yet effective framework for online KV cache clustering. Our approach is based on the observation that key states exhibit high similarity along the sequence dimension. To enable efficient clustering, we divide the sequence into chunks and propose Chunked Soft Matching, which employs an alternating partition strategy within each chunk and identifies clusters based on similarity. Chelsea then merges the KV cache within each cluster into a single centroid. Additionally, we provide a theoretical analysis of the computational complexity and the optimality of the intra-chunk partitioning strategy. Extensive experiments across various models and long-context benchmarks demonstrate that Chelsea achieves up to 80% reduction in KV cache memory usage while maintaining comparable model performance. Moreover, with minimal computational overhead, Chelsea accelerates the decoding stage of inference by up to 3.19$\times$ and reduces end-to-end latency by up to 2.72$\times$.

Simiao Li, Yun Zhang, Wei Li et al.

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a promising yet challenging model compression technique that transfers rich learning representations from a well-performing but cumbersome teacher model to a compact student model. Previous methods for image super-resolution (SR) mostly compare the feature maps directly or after standardizing the dimensions with basic algebraic operations (e.g. average, dot-product). However, the intrinsic semantic differences among feature maps are overlooked, which are caused by the disparate expressive capacity between the networks. This work presents MiPKD, a multi-granularity mixture of prior KD framework, to facilitate efficient SR model through the feature mixture in a unified latent space and stochastic network block mixture. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed MiPKD method.

Xue Wu, Jingwei Xin, Zhijun Tu et al.

Diffusion-based models have been widely used in various visual generation tasks, showing promising results in image super-resolution (SR), while typically being limited by dozens or even hundreds of sampling steps. Although existing methods aim to accelerate the inference speed of multi-step diffusion-based SR methods through knowledge distillation, their generated images exhibit insufficient semantic alignment with real images, resulting in suboptimal perceptual quality reconstruction, specifically reflected in the CLIPIQA score. These methods still have many challenges in perceptual quality and semantic fidelity. Based on the challenges, we propose VPD-SR, a novel visual perception diffusion distillation framework specifically designed for SR, aiming to construct an effective and efficient one-step SR model. Specifically, VPD-SR consists of two components: Explicit Semantic-aware Supervision (ESS) and High-Frequency Perception (HFP) loss. Firstly, the ESS leverages the powerful visual perceptual understanding capabilities of the CLIP model to extract explicit semantic supervision, thereby enhancing semantic consistency. Then, Considering that high-frequency information contributes to the visual perception quality of images, in addition to the vanilla distillation loss, the HFP loss guides the student model to restore the missing high-frequency details in degraded images that are critical for enhancing perceptual quality. Lastly, we expand VPD-SR in adversarial training manner to further enhance the authenticity of the generated content. Extensive experiments conducted on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed VPD-SR achieves superior performance compared to both previous state-of-the-art methods and the teacher model with just one-step sampling.

Shuo Jiang, Serhad Sarica, Binyang Song et al.

Patent data have long been used for engineering design research because of its large and expanding size, and widely varying massive amount of design information contained in patents. Recent advances in artificial intelligence and data science present unprecedented opportunities to develop data-driven design methods and tools, as well as advance design science, using the patent database. Herein, we survey and categorize the patent-for-design literature based on its contributions to design theories, methods, tools, and strategies, as well as the types of patent data and data-driven methods used in respective studies. Our review highlights promising future research directions in patent data-driven design research and practice.

Jiang Lu, Jie Hu, Guannan Zhao et al.

Crop diseases are responsible for the major production reduction and economic losses in agricultural industry world- wide. Monitoring for health status of crops is critical to control the spread of diseases and implement effective management. This paper presents an in-field automatic wheat disease diagnosis system based on a weakly super- vised deep learning framework, i.e. deep multiple instance learning, which achieves an integration of identification for wheat diseases and localization for disease areas with only image-level annotation for training images in wild conditions. Furthermore, a new in-field image dataset for wheat disease, Wheat Disease Database 2017 (WDD2017), is collected to verify the effectiveness of our system. Under two different architectures, i.e. VGG-FCN-VD16 and VGG-FCN-S, our system achieves the mean recognition accuracies of 97.95% and 95.12% respectively over 5-fold cross-validation on WDD2017, exceeding the results of 93.27% and 73.00% by two conventional CNN frameworks, i.e. VGG-CNN-VD16 and VGG-CNN-S. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system outperforms conventional CNN architectures on recognition accuracy under the same amount of parameters, meanwhile main- taining accurate localization for corresponding disease areas. Moreover, the proposed system has been packed into a real-time mobile app to provide support for agricultural disease diagnosis.