Baocai Yin

Chenyu Liu, Jia Pan, Jinshui Hu et al.

Recently, Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition (HMER) has gained considerable attention in pattern recognition for its diverse applications in document understanding. Current methods typically approach HMER as an image-to-sequence generation task within an autoregressive (AR) encoder-decoder framework. However, these approaches suffer from several drawbacks: 1) a lack of overall language context, limiting information utilization beyond the current decoding step; 2) error accumulation during AR decoding; and 3) slow decoding speed. To tackle these problems, this paper makes the first attempt to build a novel bottom-up Non-AutoRegressive Modeling approach for HMER, called NAMER. NAMER comprises a Visual Aware Tokenizer (VAT) and a Parallel Graph Decoder (PGD). Initially, the VAT tokenizes visible symbols and local relations at a coarse level. Subsequently, the PGD refines all tokens and establishes connectivities in parallel, leveraging comprehensive visual and linguistic contexts. Experiments on CROHME 2014/2016/2019 and HME100K datasets demonstrate that NAMER not only outperforms the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on ExpRate by 1.93%/2.35%/1.49%/0.62%, but also achieves significant speedups of 13.7x and 6.7x faster in decoding time and overall FPS, proving the effectiveness and efficiency of NAMER.

Maoyuan Ye, Jing Zhang, Juhua Liu et al.

The Segment Anything Model (SAM), a profound vision foundation model pretrained on a large-scale dataset, breaks the boundaries of general segmentation and sparks various downstream applications. This paper introduces Hi-SAM, a unified model leveraging SAM for hierarchical text segmentation. Hi-SAM excels in segmentation across four hierarchies, including pixel-level text, word, text-line, and paragraph, while realizing layout analysis as well. Specifically, we first turn SAM into a high-quality pixel-level text segmentation (TS) model through a parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach. We use this TS model to iteratively generate the pixel-level text labels in a semi-automatical manner, unifying labels across the four text hierarchies in the HierText dataset. Subsequently, with these complete labels, we launch the end-to-end trainable Hi-SAM based on the TS architecture with a customized hierarchical mask decoder. During inference, Hi-SAM offers both automatic mask generation (AMG) mode and promptable segmentation (PS) mode. In the AMG mode, Hi-SAM segments pixel-level text foreground masks initially, then samples foreground points for hierarchical text mask generation and achieves layout analysis in passing. As for the PS mode, Hi-SAM provides word, text-line, and paragraph masks with a single point click. Experimental results show the state-of-the-art performance of our TS model: 84.86% fgIOU on Total-Text and 88.96% fgIOU on TextSeg for pixel-level text segmentation. Moreover, compared to the previous specialist for joint hierarchical detection and layout analysis on HierText, Hi-SAM achieves significant improvements: 4.73% PQ and 5.39% F1 on the text-line level, 5.49% PQ and 7.39% F1 on the paragraph level layout analysis, requiring $20\times$ fewer training epochs. The code is available at https://github.com/ymy-k/Hi-SAM.

Mengnan Zhao, Lihe Zhang, Xingyi Yang et al.

Security concerns surrounding text-to-image diffusion models have driven researchers to unlearn inappropriate concepts through fine-tuning. Recent fine-tuning methods typically align the prediction distributions of unsafe prompts with those of predefined text anchors. However, these techniques exhibit a considerable performance trade-off between eliminating undesirable concepts and preserving other concepts. In this paper, we systematically analyze the impact of diverse text anchors on unlearning performance. Guided by this analysis, we propose AdvAnchor, a novel approach that generates adversarial anchors to alleviate the trade-off issue. These adversarial anchors are crafted to closely resemble the embeddings of undesirable concepts to maintain overall model performance, while selectively excluding defining attributes of these concepts for effective erasure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AdvAnchor outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our code is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AdvAnchor.

Qikai Chang, Mingjun Chen, Changpeng Pi et al.

The primary objective of Optical Chemical Structure Recognition is to identify chemical structure images into corresponding markup sequences. However, the complex two-dimensional structures of molecules, particularly those with rings and multiple branches, present significant challenges for current end-to-end methods to learn one-dimensional markup directly. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel Ring-Free Language (RFL), which utilizes a divide-and-conquer strategy to describe chemical structures in a hierarchical form. RFL allows complex molecular structures to be decomposed into multiple parts, ensuring both uniqueness and conciseness while enhancing readability. This approach significantly reduces the learning difficulty for recognition models. Leveraging RFL, we propose a universal Molecular Skeleton Decoder (MSD), which comprises a skeleton generation module that progressively predicts the molecular skeleton and individual rings, along with a branch classification module for predicting branch information. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed RFL and MSD can be applied to various mainstream methods, achieving superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches in both printed and handwritten scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/JingMog/RFL-MSD.

Mengnan Zhao, Lihe Zhang, Tianhang Zheng et al.

Large-scale diffusion models, known for their impressive image generation capabilities, have raised concerns among researchers regarding social impacts, such as the imitation of copyrighted artistic styles. In response, existing approaches turn to machine unlearning techniques to eliminate unsafe concepts from pre-trained models. However, these methods compromise the generative performance and neglect the coupling among multi-concept erasures, as well as the concept restoration problem. To address these issues, we propose a Separable Multi-concept Eraser (SepME), which mainly includes two parts: the generation of concept-irrelevant representations and the weight decoupling. The former aims to avoid unlearning substantial information that is irrelevant to forgotten concepts. The latter separates optimizable model weights, making each weight increment correspond to a specific concept erasure without affecting generative performance on other concepts. Specifically, the weight increment for erasing a specified concept is formulated as a linear combination of solutions calculated based on other known undesirable concepts. Extensive experiments indicate the efficacy of our approach in eliminating concepts, preserving model performance, and offering flexibility in the erasure or recovery of various concepts.

Chenyu Liu, Jinshui Hu, Baocai Yin et al.

Online Handwritten Text Recognition (OLHTR) has gained considerable attention for its diverse range of applications. Current approaches usually treat OLHTR as a sequence recognition task, employing either a single trajectory or image encoder, or multi-stream encoders, combined with a CTC or attention-based recognition decoder. However, these approaches face several drawbacks: 1) single encoders typically focus on either local trajectories or visual regions, lacking the ability to dynamically capture relevant global features in challenging cases; 2) multi-stream encoders, while more comprehensive, suffer from complex structures and increased inference costs. To tackle this, we propose a Collaborative learning-based OLHTR framework, called Col-OLHTR, that learns multimodal features during training while maintaining a single-stream inference process. Col-OLHTR consists of a trajectory encoder, a Point-to-Spatial Alignment (P2SA) module, and an attention-based decoder. The P2SA module is designed to learn image-level spatial features through trajectory-encoded features and 2D rotary position embeddings. During training, an additional image-stream encoder-decoder is collaboratively trained to provide supervision for P2SA features. At inference, the extra streams are discarded, and only the P2SA module is used and merged before the decoder, simplifying the process while preserving high performance. Extensive experimental results on several OLHTR benchmarks demonstrate the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, proving the effectiveness and robustness of our design.

Baocai Yin, Ji Zhao, Huajie Jiang et al.

Continual learning (CL) enables models to adapt to evolving data streams. A major challenge of CL is catastrophic forgetting, where new knowledge will overwrite previously acquired knowledge. Traditional methods usually retain the past data for replay or add additional branches in the model to learn new knowledge, which has high memory requirements. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight CL framework, Adapter-Enhanced Semantic Prompting (AESP), which integrates prompt tuning and adapter techniques. Specifically, we design semantic-guided prompts to enhance the generalization ability of visual features and utilize adapters to efficiently fuse the semantic information, aiming to learn more adaptive features for the continual learning task. Furthermore, to choose the right task prompt for feature adaptation, we have developed a novel matching mechanism for prompt selection. Extensive experiments on three CL datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves favorable performance across multiple metrics, showing its potential for advancing CL.

Hang Chen, Jun Du, Yu Hu et al.

In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning architecture to improving word-level lip-reading. On the one hand, we first introduce the multi-scale processing into the spatial feature extraction for lip-reading. Specially, we proposed hierarchical pyramidal convolution (HPConv) to replace the standard convolution in original module, leading to improvements over the model's ability to discover fine-grained lip movements. On the other hand, we merge information in all time steps of the sequence by utilizing self-attention, to make the model pay more attention to the relevant frames. These two advantages are combined together to further enhance the model's classification power. Experiments on the Lip Reading in the Wild (LRW) dataset show that our proposed model has achieved 86.83% accuracy, yielding 1.53% absolute improvement over the current state-of-the-art. We also conducted extensive experiments to better understand the behavior of the proposed model.

Hang Chen, Jun Du, Yu Hu et al.

In this paper, we propose a visual embedding approach to improving embedding aware speech enhancement (EASE) by synchronizing visual lip frames at the phone and place of articulation levels. We first extract visual embedding from lip frames using a pre-trained phone or articulation place recognizer for visual-only EASE (VEASE). Next, we extract audio-visual embedding from noisy speech and lip videos in an information intersection manner, utilizing a complementarity of audio and visual features for multi-modal EASE (MEASE). Experiments on the TCD-TIMIT corpus corrupted by simulated additive noises show that our proposed subword based VEASE approach is more effective than conventional embedding at the word level. Moreover, visual embedding at the articulation place level, leveraging upon a high correlation between place of articulation and lip shapes, shows an even better performance than that at the phone level. Finally the proposed MEASE framework, incorporating both audio and visual embedding, yields significantly better speech quality and intelligibility than those obtained with the best visual-only and audio-only EASE systems.

Boyue Wang, Yongli Hu, Junbin Gao et al.

Learning on Grassmann manifold has become popular in many computer vision tasks, with the strong capability to extract discriminative information for imagesets and videos. However, such learning algorithms particularly on high-dimensional Grassmann manifold always involve with significantly high computational cost, which seriously limits the applicability of learning on Grassmann manifold in more wide areas. In this research, we propose an unsupervised dimensionality reduction algorithm on Grassmann manifold based on the Locality Preserving Projections (LPP) criterion. LPP is a commonly used dimensionality reduction algorithm for vector-valued data, aiming to preserve local structure of data in the dimension-reduced space. The strategy is to construct a mapping from higher dimensional Grassmann manifold into the one in a relative low-dimensional with more discriminative capability. The proposed method can be optimized as a basic eigenvalue problem. The performance of our proposed method is assessed on several classification and clustering tasks and the experimental results show its clear advantages over other Grassmann based algorithms.

Haoran Chen, Yanfeng Sun, Junbin Gao et al.

Partial least squares regression (PLSR) has been a popular technique to explore the linear relationship between two datasets. However, most of algorithm implementations of PLSR may only achieve a suboptimal solution through an optimization on the Euclidean space. In this paper, we propose several novel PLSR models on Riemannian manifolds and develop optimization algorithms based on Riemannian geometry of manifolds. This algorithm can calculate all the factors of PLSR globally to avoid suboptimal solutions. In a number of experiments, we have demonstrated the benefits of applying the proposed model and algorithm to a variety of learning tasks in pattern recognition and object classification.

Boyue Wang, Yongli Hu, Junbin Gao et al.

In multi-camera video surveillance, it is challenging to represent videos from different cameras properly and fuse them efficiently for specific applications such as human activity recognition and clustering. In this paper, a novel representation for multi-camera video data, namely the Product Grassmann Manifold (PGM), is proposed to model video sequences as points on the Grassmann manifold and integrate them as a whole in the product manifold form. Additionally, with a new geometry metric on the product manifold, the conventional Low Rank Representation (LRR) model is extended onto PGM and the new LRR model can be used for clustering non-linear data, such as multi-camera video data. To evaluate the proposed method, a number of clustering experiments are conducted on several multi-camera video datasets of human activity, including Dongzhimen Transport Hub Crowd action dataset, ACT 42 Human action dataset and SKIG action dataset. The experiment results show that the proposed method outperforms many state-of-the-art clustering methods.

Xinglin Piao, Yongli Hu, Yanfeng Sun et al.

In a sparse representation based recognition scheme, it is critical to learn a desired dictionary, aiming both good representational power and discriminative performance. In this paper, we propose a new dictionary learning model for recognition applications, in which three strategies are adopted to achieve these two objectives simultaneously. First, a block-diagonal constraint is introduced into the model to eliminate the correlation between classes and enhance the discriminative performance. Second, a low-rank term is adopted to model the coherence within classes for refining the sparse representation of each class. Finally, instead of using the conventional over-complete dictionary, a specific dictionary constructed from the linear combination of the training samples is proposed to enhance the representational power of the dictionary and to improve the robustness of the sparse representation model. The proposed method is tested on several public datasets. The experimental results show the method outperforms most state-of-the-art methods.

Xinglin Piao, Yongli Hu, Junbin Gao et al.

A new submodule clustering method via sparse and low-rank representation for multi-way data is proposed in this paper. Instead of reshaping multi-way data into vectors, this method maintains their natural orders to preserve data intrinsic structures, e.g., image data kept as matrices. To implement clustering, the multi-way data, viewed as tensors, are represented by the proposed tensor sparse and low-rank model to obtain its submodule representation, called a free module, which is finally used for spectral clustering. The proposed method extends the conventional subspace clustering method based on sparse and low-rank representation to multi-way data submodule clustering by combining t-product operator. The new method is tested on several public datasets, including synthetical data, video sequences and toy images. The experiments show that the new method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, such as Sparse Subspace Clustering (SSC), Low-Rank Representation (LRR), Ordered Subspace Clustering (OSC), Robust Latent Low Rank Representation (RobustLatLRR) and Sparse Submodule Clustering method (SSmC).

Boyue Wang, Yongli Hu, Junbin Gao et al.

Many computer vision algorithms employ subspace models to represent data. The Low-rank representation (LRR) has been successfully applied in subspace clustering for which data are clustered according to their subspace structures. The possibility of extending LRR on Grassmann manifold is explored in this paper. Rather than directly embedding Grassmann manifold into a symmetric matrix space, an extrinsic view is taken by building the self-representation of LRR over the tangent space of each Grassmannian point. A new algorithm for solving the proposed Grassmannian LRR model is designed and implemented. Several clustering experiments are conducted on handwritten digits dataset, dynamic texture video clips and YouTube celebrity face video data. The experimental results show our method outperforms a number of existing methods.