Chengqian Ma

Girish Narayanswamy, Yujia Liu, Yuzhe Yang et al.

Understanding of human visual perception has historically inspired the design of computer vision architectures. As an example, perception occurs at different scales both spatially and temporally, suggesting that the extraction of salient visual information may be made more effective by paying attention to specific features at varying scales. Visual changes in the body due to physiological processes also occur at different scales and with modality-specific characteristic properties. Inspired by this, we present BigSmall, an efficient architecture for physiological and behavioral measurement. We present the first joint camera-based facial action, cardiac, and pulmonary measurement model. We propose a multi-branch network with wrapping temporal shift modules that yields both accuracy and efficiency gains. We observe that fusing low-level features leads to suboptimal performance, but that fusing high level features enables efficiency gains with negligible loss in accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that BigSmall significantly reduces the computational costs. Furthermore, compared to existing task-specific models, BigSmall achieves comparable or better results on multiple physiological measurement tasks simultaneously with a unified model.

Chengqian Ma, Zhiqiang Wu, Chunlei Cai et al.

In the past decades, lots of progress have been done in the video compression field including traditional video codec and learning-based video codec. However, few studies focus on using preprocessing techniques to improve the rate-distortion performance. In this paper, we propose a rate-perception optimized preprocessing (RPP) method. We first introduce an adaptive Discrete Cosine Transform loss function which can save the bitrate and keep essential high frequency components as well. Furthermore, we also combine several state-of-the-art techniques from low-level vision fields into our approach, such as the high-order degradation model, efficient lightweight network design, and Image Quality Assessment model. By jointly using these powerful techniques, our RPP approach can achieve on average, 16.27% bitrate saving with different video encoders like AVC, HEVC, and VVC under multiple quality metrics. In the deployment stage, our RPP method is very simple and efficient which is not required any changes in the setting of video encoding, streaming, and decoding. Each input frame only needs to make a single pass through RPP before sending into video encoders. In addition, in our subjective visual quality test, 87% of users think videos with RPP are better or equal to videos by only using the codec to compress, while these videos with RPP save about 12% bitrate on average. Our RPP framework has been integrated into the production environment of our video transcoding services which serve millions of users every day.

Chengqian Ma, Wei Tao, Yiwen Guo · tencent-ai

Spoken Dialogue Models (SDMs) have recently attracted significant attention for their ability to generate voice responses directly to users' spoken queries. Despite their increasing popularity, there exists a gap in research focused on comprehensively understanding their practical effectiveness in comprehending and emulating human conversations. This is especially true compared to text-based Large Language Models (LLMs), which benefit from extensive benchmarking. Human voice interactions are inherently more complex than text due to characteristics unique to spoken dialogue. Ambiguity poses one challenge, stemming from semantic factors like polysemy, as well as phonological aspects such as heterograph, heteronyms, and stress patterns. Additionally, context-dependency, like omission, coreference, and multi-turn interaction, adds further complexity to human conversational dynamics. To illuminate the current state of SDM development and to address these challenges, we present a benchmark dataset in this paper, which comprises 1,079 instances in English and Chinese. Accompanied by an LLM-based evaluation method that closely aligns with human judgment, this dataset facilitates a comprehensive exploration of the performance of SDMs in tackling these practical challenges.

Xiaxu Chen, Wei Li, Chunxu Liu et al.

Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) is proved to be greatly valuable for enhancing the reasoning ability of LLMs. Researchers have been starting to apply RFT to MLLMs, hoping it will also enhance the capabilities of visual understanding. However, these works are at a very early stage and have not examined how suitable RFT actually is for visual tasks. In this work, we endeavor to understand the suitabilities and limitations of RFT for visual tasks, through experimental analysis and observations. We start by quantitative comparisons on various tasks, which shows RFT is generally better than SFT on visual tasks. %especially when the number of training samples are limited. To check whether such advantages are brought up by the reasoning process, we design a new reward that encourages the model to ``think'' more, whose results show more thinking can be beneficial for complicated tasks but harmful for simple tasks. We hope this study can provide more insight for the rapid advancements on this topic.

Theodore Curran, Chengqian Ma, Xin Liu et al.

Hypertension is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. The ability to diagnose and treat hypertension in the ambulatory population is hindered by limited access and poor adherence to current methods of monitoring blood pressure (BP), specifically, cuff-based devices. Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) evaluates an individual's pulse waveform through a standard camera without physical contact. Cameras are readily available to the majority of the global population via embedded technologies such as smartphones, thus rPPG is a scalable and promising non-invasive method of BP monitoring. The few studies investigating rPPG for BP measurement have excluded high-risk populations, including those with cardiovascular disease (CVD) or its risk factors, as well as subjects in active cardiac arrhythmia. The impact of arrhythmia, like atrial fibrillation, on the prediction of BP using rPPG is currently uncertain. We performed a study to better understand the relationship between rPPG and BP in a real-world sample of ambulatory patients from a cardiology clinic with established CVD or risk factors for CVD. We collected simultaneous rPPG, PPG, BP, ECG, and other vital signs data from 143 subjects while at rest, and used this data plus demographics to train a deep learning model to predict BP. We report that facial rPPG yields a signal that is comparable to finger PPG. Pulse wave analysis (PWA)-based BP estimates on this cohort performed comparably to studies on healthier subjects, and notably, the accuracy of BP prediction in subjects with atrial fibrillation was not inferior to subjects with normal sinus rhythm. In a binary classification task, the rPPG model identified subjects with systolic BP $\geq$ 130 mm Hg with a positive predictive value of 71% (baseline prevalence 48.3%), highlighting the potential of rPPG for hypertension monitoring.

Jiarui Cai, Yizhou Wang, Haotian Zhang et al.

Multiple object tracking (MOT) is a crucial task in computer vision society. However, most tracking-by-detection MOT methods, with available detected bounding boxes, cannot effectively handle static, slow-moving and fast-moving camera scenarios simultaneously due to ego-motion and frequent occlusion. In this work, we propose a novel tracking framework, called "instance-aware MOT" (IA-MOT), that can track multiple objects in either static or moving cameras by jointly considering the instance-level features and object motions. First, robust appearance features are extracted from a variant of Mask R-CNN detector with an additional embedding head, by sending the given detections as the region proposals. Meanwhile, the spatial attention, which focuses on the foreground within the bounding boxes, is generated from the given instance masks and applied to the extracted embedding features. In the tracking stage, object instance masks are aligned by feature similarity and motion consistency using the Hungarian association algorithm. Moreover, object re-identification (ReID) is incorporated to recover ID switches caused by long-term occlusion or missing detection. Overall, when evaluated on the MOTS20 and KITTI-MOTS dataset, our proposed method won the first place in Track 3 of the BMTT Challenge in CVPR2020 workshops.