Xiang Chen

Xiang Chen, Hao Li, Mingqiang Li et al.

Transformers-based methods have achieved significant performance in image deraining as they can model the non-local information which is vital for high-quality image reconstruction. In this paper, we find that most existing Transformers usually use all similarities of the tokens from the query-key pairs for the feature aggregation. However, if the tokens from the query are different from those of the key, the self-attention values estimated from these tokens also involve in feature aggregation, which accordingly interferes with the clear image restoration. To overcome this problem, we propose an effective DeRaining network, Sparse Transformer (DRSformer) that can adaptively keep the most useful self-attention values for feature aggregation so that the aggregated features better facilitate high-quality image reconstruction. Specifically, we develop a learnable top-k selection operator to adaptively retain the most crucial attention scores from the keys for each query for better feature aggregation. Simultaneously, as the naive feed-forward network in Transformers does not model the multi-scale information that is important for latent clear image restoration, we develop an effective mixed-scale feed-forward network to generate better features for image deraining. To learn an enriched set of hybrid features, which combines local context from CNN operators, we equip our model with mixture of experts feature compensator to present a cooperation refinement deraining scheme. Extensive experimental results on the commonly used benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method achieves favorable performance against state-of-the-art approaches. The source code and trained models are available at https://github.com/cschenxiang/DRSformer.

Yukang Gan, Yixiao Ge, Chang Zhou et al. · tencent-ai

Large-scale embedding-based retrieval (EBR) is the cornerstone of search-related industrial applications. Given a user query, the system of EBR aims to identify relevant information from a large corpus of documents that may be tens or hundreds of billions in size. The storage and computation turn out to be expensive and inefficient with massive documents and high concurrent queries, making it difficult to further scale up. To tackle the challenge, we propose a binary embedding-based retrieval (BEBR) engine equipped with a recurrent binarization algorithm that enables customized bits per dimension. Specifically, we compress the full-precision query and document embeddings, formulated as float vectors in general, into a composition of multiple binary vectors using a lightweight transformation model with residual multilayer perception (MLP) blocks. We can therefore tailor the number of bits for different applications to trade off accuracy loss and cost savings. Importantly, we enable task-agnostic efficient training of the binarization model using a new embedding-to-embedding strategy. We also exploit the compatible training of binary embeddings so that the BEBR engine can support indexing among multiple embedding versions within a unified system. To further realize efficient search, we propose Symmetric Distance Calculation (SDC) to achieve lower response time than Hamming codes. We successfully employed the introduced BEBR to Tencent products, including Sogou, Tencent Video, QQ World, etc. The binarization algorithm can be seamlessly generalized to various tasks with multiple modalities. Extensive experiments on offline benchmarks and online A/B tests demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our method, significantly saving 30%~50% index costs with almost no loss of accuracy at the system level.

Wenzhuo Jin, Qianfeng Yang, Xianhao Wu et al.

Early-stage fire scenes (0-15 minutes after ignition) represent a crucial temporal window for emergency interventions. During this stage, the smoke produced by combustion significantly reduces the visibility of surveillance systems, severely impairing situational awareness and hindering effective emergency response and rescue operations. Consequently, there is an urgent need to remove smoke from images to obtain clear scene information. However, the development of smoke removal algorithms remains limited due to the lack of large-scale, real-world datasets comprising paired smoke-free and smoke-degraded images. To address these limitations, we present a real-world surveillance image desmoking benchmark dataset named SmokeBench, which contains image pairs captured under diverse scenes setup and smoke concentration. The curated dataset provides precisely aligned degraded and clean images, enabling supervised learning and rigorous evaluation. We conduct comprehensive experiments by benchmarking a variety of desmoking methods on our dataset. Our dataset provides a valuable foundation for advancing robust and practical image desmoking in real-world fire scenes. This dataset has been released to the public and can be downloaded from https://github.com/ncfjd/SmokeBench.

Xiang Chen, Yufeng Huang, Lei Xu

Rain streaks bring serious blurring and visual quality degradation, which often vary in size, direction and density. Current CNN-based methods achieve encouraging performance, while are limited to depict rain characteristics and recover image details in the poor visibility environment. To address these issues, we present a Multi-scale Hourglass Hierarchical Fusion Network (MH2F-Net) in end-to-end manner, to exactly captures rain streak features with multi-scale extraction, hierarchical distillation and information aggregation. For better extracting the features, a novel Multi-scale Hourglass Extraction Block (MHEB) is proposed to get local and global features across different scales through down- and up-sample process. Besides, a Hierarchical Attentive Distillation Block (HADB) then employs the dual attention feature responses to adaptively recalibrate the hierarchical features and eliminate the redundant ones. Further, we introduce a Residual Projected Feature Fusion (RPFF) strategy to progressively discriminate feature learning and aggregate different features instead of directly concatenating or adding. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real rainy datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the designed MH2F-Net by comparing with recent state-of-the-art deraining algorithms. Our source code will be available on the GitHub: https://github.com/cxtalk/MH2F-Net.

Xiaoning Liu, Zongwei Wu, Ao Li et al.

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2024 low light image enhancement challenge, highlighting the proposed solutions and results. The aim of this challenge is to discover an effective network design or solution capable of generating brighter, clearer, and visually appealing results when dealing with a variety of conditions, including ultra-high resolution (4K and beyond), non-uniform illumination, backlighting, extreme darkness, and night scenes. A notable total of 428 participants registered for the challenge, with 22 teams ultimately making valid submissions. This paper meticulously evaluates the state-of-the-art advancements in enhancing low-light images, reflecting the significant progress and creativity in this field.

Huiling Zhou, Xianhao Wu, Hongming Chen et al.

Remote sensing image dehazing (RSID) aims to remove nonuniform and physically irregular haze factors for high-quality image restoration. The emergence of CNNs and Transformers has taken extraordinary strides in the RSID arena. However, these methods often struggle to demonstrate the balance of adequate long-range dependency modeling and maintaining computational efficiency. To this end, we propose the first lightweight network on the mamba-based model called RSDhamba in the field of RSID. Greatly inspired by the recent rise of Selective State Space Model (SSM) for its superior performance in modeling linear complexity and remote dependencies, our designed RSDehamba integrates the SSM framework into the U-Net architecture. Specifically, we propose the Vision Dehamba Block (VDB) as the core component of the overall network, which utilizes the linear complexity of SSM to achieve the capability of global context encoding. Simultaneously, the Direction-aware Scan Module (DSM) is designed to dynamically aggregate feature exchanges over different directional domains to effectively enhance the flexibility of sensing the spatially varying distribution of haze. In this way, our RSDhamba fully demonstrates the superiority of spatial distance capture dependencies and channel information exchange for better extraction of haze features. Extensive experimental results on widely used benchmarks validate the surpassing performance of our RSDehamba against existing state-of-the-art methods.

Yu Xia, Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Zhouhang Xie et al.

Active Learning (AL) has been a powerful paradigm for improving model efficiency and performance by selecting the most informative data points for labeling and training. In recent active learning frameworks, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been employed not only for selection but also for generating entirely new data instances and providing more cost-effective annotations. Motivated by the increasing importance of high-quality data and efficient model training in the era of LLMs, we present a comprehensive survey on LLM-based Active Learning. We introduce an intuitive taxonomy that categorizes these techniques and discuss the transformative roles LLMs can play in the active learning loop. We further examine the impact of AL on LLM learning paradigms and its applications across various domains. Finally, we identify open challenges and propose future research directions. This survey aims to serve as an up-to-date resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to gain an intuitive understanding of LLM-based AL techniques and deploy them to new applications.

Boxue Xiao, Zhuoran Zheng, Xiang Chen et al.

Currently, most single image dehazing models cannot run an ultra-high-resolution (UHD) image with a single GPU shader in real-time. To address the problem, we introduce the principle of infinite approximation of Taylor's theorem with the Laplace pyramid pattern to build a model which is capable of handling 4K hazy images in real-time. The N branch networks of the pyramid network correspond to the N constraint terms in Taylor's theorem. Low-order polynomials reconstruct the low-frequency information of the image (e.g. color, illumination). High-order polynomials regress the high-frequency information of the image (e.g. texture). In addition, we propose a Tucker reconstruction-based regularization term that acts on each branch network of the pyramid model. It further constrains the generation of anomalous signals in the feature space. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach can not only run 4K images with haze in real-time on a single GPU (80FPS) but also has unparalleled interpretability. The developed method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on two benchmarks (O/I-HAZE) and our updated 4KID dataset while providing the reliable groundwork for subsequent optimization schemes.

Jianguo Zhang, Trung Bui, Seunghyun Yoon et al.

In this work, we focus on a more challenging few-shot intent detection scenario where many intents are fine-grained and semantically similar. We present a simple yet effective few-shot intent detection schema via contrastive pre-training and fine-tuning. Specifically, we first conduct self-supervised contrastive pre-training on collected intent datasets, which implicitly learns to discriminate semantically similar utterances without using any labels. We then perform few-shot intent detection together with supervised contrastive learning, which explicitly pulls utterances from the same intent closer and pushes utterances across different intents farther. Experimental results show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three challenging intent detection datasets under 5-shot and 10-shot settings.

Xiang Chen, Jinshan Pan, Kui Jiang et al.

Learning single image deraining (SID) networks from an unpaired set of clean and rainy images is practical and valuable as acquiring paired real-world data is almost infeasible. However, without the paired data as the supervision, learning a SID network is challenging. Moreover, simply using existing unpaired learning methods (e.g., unpaired adversarial learning and cycle-consistency constraints) in the SID task is insufficient to learn the underlying relationship from rainy inputs to clean outputs as there exists significant domain gap between the rainy and clean images. In this paper, we develop an effective unpaired SID adversarial framework which explores mutual properties of the unpaired exemplars by a dual contrastive learning manner in a deep feature space, named as DCD-GAN. The proposed method mainly consists of two cooperative branches: Bidirectional Translation Branch (BTB) and Contrastive Guidance Branch (CGB). Specifically, BTB exploits full advantage of the circulatory architecture of adversarial consistency to generate abundant exemplar pairs and excavates latent feature distributions between two domains by equipping it with bidirectional mapping. Simultaneously, CGB implicitly constrains the embeddings of different exemplars in the deep feature space by encouraging the similar feature distributions closer while pushing the dissimilar further away, in order to better facilitate rain removal and help image restoration. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method performs favorably against existing unpaired deraining approaches on both synthetic and real-world datasets, and generates comparable results against several fully-supervised or semi-supervised models.