Tao Zhang

Shuiying Xiang, Tao Zhang, Shuqing Jiang et al.

Spiking neural network (SNN) is a biologically-plausible model and exhibits advantages of high computational capability and low power consumption. While the training of deep SNN is still an open problem, which limits the real-world applications of deep SNN. Here we propose a deep SNN architecture named Spiking SiamFC++ for object tracking with end-to-end direct training. Specifically, the AlexNet network is extended in the time domain to extract the feature, and the surrogate gradient function is adopted to realize direct supervised training of the deep SNN. To examine the performance of the Spiking SiamFC++, several tracking benchmarks including OTB2013, OTB2015, VOT2015, VOT2016, and UAV123 are considered. It is found that, the precision loss is small compared with the original SiamFC++. Compared with the existing SNN-based target tracker, e.g., the SiamSNN, the precision (succession) of the proposed Spiking SiamFC++ reaches 85.24% (64.37%), which is much higher than that of 52.78% (44.32%) achieved by the SiamSNN. To our best knowledge, the performance of the Spiking SiamFC++ outperforms the existing state-of-the-art approaches in SNN-based object tracking, which provides a novel path for SNN application in the field of target tracking. This work may further promote the development of SNN algorithms and neuromorphic chips.

Tao Zhang, Jinyong Wen, Zhen Chen et al.

Pre-training techniques significantly enhance the performance of semantic segmentation tasks with limited training data. However, the efficacy under a large domain gap between pre-training (e.g. RGB) and fine-tuning (e.g. infrared) remains underexplored. In this study, we first benchmark the infrared semantic segmentation performance of various pre-training methods and reveal several phenomena distinct from the RGB domain. Next, our layerwise analysis of pre-trained attention maps uncovers that: (1) There are three typical attention patterns (local, hybrid, and global); (2) Pre-training tasks notably influence the pattern distribution across layers; (3) The hybrid pattern is crucial for semantic segmentation as it attends to both nearby and foreground elements; (4) The texture bias impedes model generalization in infrared tasks. Building on these insights, we propose UNIP, a UNified Infrared Pre-training framework, to enhance the pre-trained model performance. This framework uses the hybrid-attention distillation NMI-HAD as the pre-training target, a large-scale mixed dataset InfMix for pre-training, and a last-layer feature pyramid network LL-FPN for fine-tuning. Experimental results show that UNIP outperforms various pre-training methods by up to 13.5\% in average mIoU on three infrared segmentation tasks, evaluated using fine-tuning and linear probing metrics. UNIP-S achieves performance on par with MAE-L while requiring only 1/10 of the computational cost. Furthermore, UNIP significantly surpasses state-of-the-art (SOTA) infrared or RGB segmentation methods and demonstrates broad potential for application in other modalities, such as RGB and depth. Our code is available at https://github.com/casiatao/UNIP.

Yuyang Hong, Qi Yang, Tao Zhang et al.

Recently, significant progress has been made in multi-modal continual learning, aiming to learn new tasks sequentially in multi-modal settings while preserving performance on previously learned ones. However, existing methods mainly focus on coarse-grained tasks, with limitations in addressing modality entanglement in fine-grained continual learning settings. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel Continual Audio-Visual Segmentation (CAVS) task, aiming to continuously segment new classes guided by audio. Through comprehensive analysis, two critical challenges are identified: 1) multi-modal semantic drift, where a sounding objects is labeled as background in sequential tasks; 2) co-occurrence confusion, where frequent co-occurring classes tend to be confused. In this work, a Collision-based Multi-modal Rehearsal (CMR) framework is designed to address these challenges. Specifically, for multi-modal semantic drift, a Multi-modal Sample Selection (MSS) strategy is proposed to select samples with high modal consistency for rehearsal. Meanwhile, for co-occurence confusion, a Collision-based Sample Rehearsal (CSR) mechanism is designed, allowing for the increase of rehearsal sample frequency of those confusable classes during training process. Moreover, we construct three audio-visual incremental scenarios to verify effectiveness of our method. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms single-modal continual learning methods.

Gary Song Yan, Yusen Zhang, Jinyu Zhao et al.

In this pioneering study, we introduce StyleWallfacer, a groundbreaking unified training and inference framework, which not only addresses various issues encountered in the style transfer process of traditional methods but also unifies the framework for different tasks. This framework is designed to revolutionize the field by enabling artist level style transfer and text driven stylization. First, we propose a semantic-based style injection method that uses BLIP to generate text descriptions strictly aligned with the semantics of the style image in CLIP space. By leveraging a large language model to remove style-related descriptions from these descriptions, we create a semantic gap. This gap is then used to fine-tune the model, enabling efficient and drift-free injection of style knowledge. Second, we propose a data augmentation strategy based on human feedback, incorporating high-quality samples generated early in the fine-tuning process into the training set to facilitate progressive learning and significantly reduce its overfitting. Finally, we design a training-free triple diffusion process using the fine-tuned model, which manipulates the features of self-attention layers in a manner similar to the cross-attention mechanism. Specifically, in the generation process, the key and value of the content-related process are replaced with those of the style-related process to inject style while maintaining text control over the model. We also introduce query preservation to mitigate disruptions to the original content. Under such a design, we have achieved high-quality image-driven style transfer and text-driven stylization, delivering artist-level style transfer results while preserving the original image content. Moreover, we achieve image color editing during the style transfer process for the first time.