Jie Wang

Minyi Zhao, Miao Wang, Fan Bai et al.

Scene text image super-resolution (STISR) has been regarded as an important pre-processing task for text recognition from low-resolution scene text images. Most recent approaches use the recognizer's feedback as clues to guide super-resolution. However, directly using recognition clue has two problems: 1) Compatibility. It is in the form of probability distribution, has an obvious modal gap with STISR - a pixel-level task; 2) Inaccuracy. it usually contains wrong information, thus will mislead the main task and degrade super-resolution performance. In this paper, we present a novel method C3-STISR that jointly exploits the recognizer's feedback, visual and linguistical information as clues to guide super-resolution. Here, visual clue is from the images of texts predicted by the recognizer, which is informative and more compatible with the STISR task; while linguistical clue is generated by a pre-trained character-level language model, which is able to correct the predicted texts. We design effective extraction and fusion mechanisms for the triple cross-modal clues to generate a comprehensive and unified guidance for super-resolution. Extensive experiments on TextZoom show that C3-STISR outperforms the SOTA methods in fidelity and recognition performance. Code is available in https://github.com/zhaominyiz/C3-STISR.

Jieming Yu, An Wang, Wenzhen Dong et al.

The recent Segment Anything Model (SAM) 2 has demonstrated remarkable foundational competence in semantic segmentation, with its memory mechanism and mask decoder further addressing challenges in video tracking and object occlusion, thereby achieving superior results in interactive segmentation for both images and videos. Building upon our previous empirical studies, we further explore the zero-shot segmentation performance of SAM 2 in robot-assisted surgery based on prompts, alongside its robustness against real-world corruption. For static images, we employ two forms of prompts: 1-point and bounding box, while for video sequences, the 1-point prompt is applied to the initial frame. Through extensive experimentation on the MICCAI EndoVis 2017 and EndoVis 2018 benchmarks, SAM 2, when utilizing bounding box prompts, outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in comparative evaluations. The results with point prompts also exhibit a substantial enhancement over SAM's capabilities, nearing or even surpassing existing unprompted SOTA methodologies. Besides, SAM 2 demonstrates improved inference speed and less performance degradation against various image corruption. Although slightly unsatisfactory results remain in specific edges or regions, SAM 2's robust adaptability to 1-point prompts underscores its potential for downstream surgical tasks with limited prompt requirements.

Hongyu Hu, Tiancheng Lin, Jie Wang et al.

Large-scale vision-language models (VLMs), e.g., CLIP, learn broad visual concepts from tedious training data, showing superb generalization ability. Amount of prompt learning methods have been proposed to efficiently adapt the VLMs to downstream tasks with only a few training samples. We introduce a novel method to improve the prompt learning of vision-language models by incorporating pre-trained large language models (LLMs), called Dual-Aligned Prompt Tuning (DuAl-PT). Learnable prompts, like CoOp, implicitly model the context through end-to-end training, which are difficult to control and interpret. While explicit context descriptions generated by LLMs, like GPT-3, can be directly used for zero-shot classification, such prompts are overly relying on LLMs and still underexplored in few-shot domains. With DuAl-PT, we propose to learn more context-aware prompts, benefiting from both explicit and implicit context modeling. To achieve this, we introduce a pre-trained LLM to generate context descriptions, and we encourage the prompts to learn from the LLM's knowledge by alignment, as well as the alignment between prompts and local image features. Empirically, DuAl-PT achieves superior performance on 11 downstream datasets on few-shot recognition and base-to-new generalization. Hopefully, DuAl-PT can serve as a strong baseline. Code will be available.

Guankun Wang, Long Bai, Wan Jun Nah et al.

Recent advancements in Surgical Visual Question Answering (Surgical-VQA) and related region grounding have shown great promise for robotic and medical applications, addressing the critical need for automated methods in personalized surgical mentorship. However, existing models primarily provide simple structured answers and struggle with complex scenarios due to their limited capability in recognizing long-range dependencies and aligning multimodal information. In this paper, we introduce Surgical-LVLM, a novel personalized large vision-language model tailored for complex surgical scenarios. Leveraging the pre-trained large vision-language model and specialized Visual Perception LoRA (VP-LoRA) blocks, our model excels in understanding complex visual-language tasks within surgical contexts. In addressing the visual grounding task, we propose the Token-Interaction (TIT) module, which strengthens the interaction between the grounding module and the language responses of the Large Visual Language Model (LVLM) after projecting them into the latent space. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Surgical-LVLM on several benchmarks, including EndoVis-17-VQLA, EndoVis-18-VQLA, and a newly introduced EndoVis Conversations dataset, which sets new performance standards. Our work contributes to advancing the field of automated surgical mentorship by providing a context-aware solution.

Zhihai Wang, Jie Wang, Jilai Pan et al.

Tree-search-based reasoning methods have significantly enhanced the reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs) by facilitating the exploration of multiple intermediate reasoning steps, i.e., thoughts. However, these methods suffer from substantial inference latency, as they have to generate numerous reasoning thoughts, severely limiting LLM applicability. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Speculative Search (SpecSearch) framework that significantly accelerates LLM reasoning by optimizing thought generation. Specifically, SpecSearch utilizes a small model to strategically collaborate with a large model at both thought and token levels, efficiently generating high-quality reasoning thoughts. The major pillar of SpecSearch is a novel quality-preserving rejection mechanism, which effectively filters out thoughts whose quality falls below that of the large model's outputs. Moreover, we show that SpecSearch preserves comparable reasoning quality to the large model. Experiments on both the Qwen and Llama models demonstrate that SpecSearch significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving up to 2.12$\times$ speedup with comparable reasoning quality.

Jie Wang, Yichen Wang, Zhilin Zhang et al.

With strong expressive capabilities in Large Language Models(LLMs), generative models effectively capture sentiment structures and deep semantics, however, challenges remain in fine-grained sentiment classification across multi-lingual and complex contexts. To address this, we propose the Sentiment Cross-Lingual Recognition and Logic Framework (SentiXRL), which incorporates two modules,an emotion retrieval enhancement module to improve sentiment classification accuracy in complex contexts through historical dialogue and logical reasoning,and a self-circulating analysis negotiation mechanism (SANM)to facilitates autonomous decision-making within a single model for classification tasks.We have validated SentiXRL's superiority on multiple standard datasets, outperforming existing models on CPED and CH-SIMS,and achieving overall better performance on MELD,Emorynlp and IEMOCAP. Notably, we unified labels across several fine-grained sentiment annotation datasets and conducted category confusion experiments, revealing challenges and impacts of class imbalance in standard datasets.

Yongdong Huang, Yuanzhan Li, Xulong Cao et al.

Using neural networks to represent 3D objects has become popular. However, many previous works employ neural networks with fixed architecture and size to represent different 3D objects, which lead to excessive network parameters for simple objects and limited reconstruction accuracy for complex objects. For each 3D model, it is desirable to have an end-to-end neural network with as few parameters as possible to achieve high-fidelity reconstruction. In this paper, we propose an efficient voxel reconstruction method utilizing neural architecture search (NAS) and binary classification. Taking the number of layers, the number of nodes in each layer, and the activation function of each layer as the search space, a specific network architecture can be obtained based on reinforcement learning technology. Furthermore, to get rid of the traditional surface reconstruction algorithms (e.g., marching cube) used after network inference, we complete the end-to-end network by classifying binary voxels. Compared to other signed distance field (SDF) prediction or binary classification networks, our method achieves significantly higher reconstruction accuracy using fewer network parameters.

Jeremiah Birrell, Paul Dupuis, Markos A. Katsoulakis et al.

We derive a new variational formula for the Rényi family of divergences, $R_α(Q\|P)$, between probability measures $Q$ and $P$. Our result generalizes the classical Donsker-Varadhan variational formula for the Kullback-Leibler divergence. We further show that this Rényi variational formula holds over a range of function spaces; this leads to a formula for the optimizer under very weak assumptions and is also key in our development of a consistency theory for Rényi divergence estimators. By applying this theory to neural-network estimators, we show that if a neural network family satisfies one of several strengthened versions of the universal approximation property then the corresponding Rényi divergence estimator is consistent. In contrast to density-estimator based methods, our estimators involve only expectations under $Q$ and $P$ and hence are more effective in high dimensional systems. We illustrate this via several numerical examples of neural network estimation in systems of up to 5000 dimensions.

Shanxin Yuan, Radu Timofte, Gregory Slabaugh et al.

This paper reviews the first-ever image demoireing challenge that was part of the Advances in Image Manipulation (AIM) workshop, held in conjunction with ICCV 2019. This paper describes the challenge, and focuses on the proposed solutions and their results. Demoireing is a difficult task of removing moire patterns from an image to reveal an underlying clean image. A new dataset, called LCDMoire was created for this challenge, and consists of 10,200 synthetically generated image pairs (moire and clean ground truth). The challenge was divided into 2 tracks. Track 1 targeted fidelity, measuring the ability of demoire methods to obtain a moire-free image compared with the ground truth, while Track 2 examined the perceptual quality of demoire methods. The tracks had 60 and 39 registered participants, respectively. A total of eight teams competed in the final testing phase. The entries span the current the state-of-the-art in the image demoireing problem.

Luyan Ji, Jie Wang, Xiurui Geng et al.

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the potential of Gaofen-2 (GF-2) high resolution multispectral sensor (MS) and panchromatic (PAN) imagery on water mapping. Difficulties of water mapping on high resolution data includes: 1) misclassification between water and shadows or other low-reflectance ground objects, which is mostly caused by the spectral similarity within the given band range; 2) small water bodies with size smaller than the spatial resolution of MS image. To solve the confusion between water and low-reflectance objects, the Landsat 8 time series with two shortwave infrared (SWIR) bands is added because water has extremely strong absorption in SWIR. In order to integrate the three multi-sensor, multi-resolution data sets, the probabilistic graphical model (PGM) is utilized here with conditional probability distribution defined mainly based on the size of each object. For comparison, results from the SVM classifier on the PCA fused and MS data, thresholding method on the PAN image, and water index method on the Landsat data are computed. The confusion matrices are calculated for all the methods. The results demonstrate that the PGM method can achieve the best performance with the highest overall accuracy. Moreover, small rivers can also be extracted by adding weight on the PAN result in PGM. Finally, the post-classification procedure is applied on the PGM result to further exclude misclassification in shadow and water-land boundary regions. Accordingly, the producer's, user's and overall accuracy are all increased, indicating the effectiveness of our method.

Jie Wang, Luyan Ji, Xiaomeng Huang et al.

There is a trend to acquire high accuracy land-cover maps using multi-source classification methods, most of which are based on data fusion, especially pixel- or feature-level fusions. A probabilistic graphical model (PGM) approach is proposed in this research for 30 m resolution land-cover mapping with multi-temporal Landsat and MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data. Independent classifiers were applied to two single-date Landsat 8 scenes and the MODIS time-series data, respectively, for probability estimation. A PGM was created for each pixel in Landsat 8 data. Conditional probability distributions were computed based on data quality and reliability by using information selectively. Using the administrative territory of Beijing City (Area-1) and a coastal region of Shandong province, China (Area-2) as study areas, multiple land-cover maps were generated for comparison. Quantitative results show the effectiveness of the proposed method. Overall accuracies promoted from 74.0% (maps acquired from single-temporal Landsat images) to 81.8% (output of the PGM) for Area-1. Improvements can also be seen when using MODIS data and only a single-temporal Landsat image as input (overall accuracy: 78.4% versus 74.0% for Area-1, and 86.8% versus 83.0% for Area-2). Information from MODIS data did not help much when the PGM was applied to cloud free regions of. One of the advantages of the proposed method is that it can be applied where multi-temporal data cannot be simply stacked as a multi-layered image.