Ling Shao

Jiahui Zhang, Fangneng Zhan, Yingchen Yu et al.

Pose-free neural radiance fields (NeRF) aim to train NeRF with unposed multi-view images and it has achieved very impressive success in recent years. Most existing works share the pipeline of training a coarse pose estimator with rendered images at first, followed by a joint optimization of estimated poses and neural radiance field. However, as the pose estimator is trained with only rendered images, the pose estimation is usually biased or inaccurate for real images due to the domain gap between real images and rendered images, leading to poor robustness for the pose estimation of real images and further local minima in joint optimization. We design IR-NeRF, an innovative pose-free NeRF that introduces implicit pose regularization to refine pose estimator with unposed real images and improve the robustness of the pose estimation for real images. With a collection of 2D images of a specific scene, IR-NeRF constructs a scene codebook that stores scene features and captures the scene-specific pose distribution implicitly as priors. Thus, the robustness of pose estimation can be promoted with the scene priors according to the rationale that a 2D real image can be well reconstructed from the scene codebook only when its estimated pose lies within the pose distribution. Extensive experiments show that IR-NeRF achieves superior novel view synthesis and outperforms the state-of-the-art consistently across multiple synthetic and real datasets.

Jingyi Zhang, Jiaxing Huang, Xiaoqin Zhang et al.

Test-time prompt tuning, which learns prompts online with unlabelled test samples during the inference stage, has demonstrated great potential by learning effective prompts on-the-fly without requiring any task-specific annotations. However, its performance often degrades clearly along the tuning process when the prompts are continuously updated with the test data flow, and the degradation becomes more severe when the domain of test samples changes continuously. We propose HisTPT, a Historical Test-time Prompt Tuning technique that memorizes the useful knowledge of the learnt test samples and enables robust test-time prompt tuning with the memorized knowledge. HisTPT introduces three types of knowledge banks, namely, local knowledge bank, hard-sample knowledge bank, and global knowledge bank, each of which works with different mechanisms for effective knowledge memorization and test-time prompt optimization. In addition, HisTPT features an adaptive knowledge retrieval mechanism that regularizes the prediction of each test sample by adaptively retrieving the memorized knowledge. Extensive experiments show that HisTPT achieves superior prompt tuning performance consistently while handling different visual recognition tasks (e.g., image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection) and test samples from continuously changing domains.

Yilin Tao, Jiashui Huang, Huaze Xu et al.

Aesthetic Image Captioning (AIC) aims to generate textual descriptions of image aesthetics, becoming a key research direction in the field of computational aesthetics. In recent years, pretrained Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced rapidly, leading to a significant increase in image aesthetics research that integrates both visual and textual modalities. However, most existing studies on image aesthetics primarily focus on predicting aesthetic ratings and have shown limited application in AIC. Existing AIC works leveraging MLLMs predominantly rely on fine-tuning methods without specifically adapting MLLMs to focus on target aesthetic content. To address this limitation, we propose the Aesthetic Saliency Enhanced Multimodal Large Language Model (ASE-MLLM), an end-to-end framework that explicitly incorporates aesthetic saliency into MLLMs. Within this framework, we introduce the Image Aesthetic Saliency Module (IASM), which efficiently and effectively extracts aesthetic saliency features from images. Additionally, we design IAS-ViT as the image encoder for MLLMs, this module fuses aesthetic saliency features with original image features via a cross-attention mechanism. To the best of our knowledge, ASE-MLLM is the first framework to integrate image aesthetic saliency into MLLMs specifically for AIC tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrated that our approach significantly outperformed traditional methods and generic MLLMs on current mainstream AIC benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance.

Zhirui Chen, Wei Shen, Jiashui Huang et al.

Despite significant progress, large language models (LLMs) still struggle with long contexts due to memory limitations and their inability to tackle complex and long-context tasks. Additionally, LLMs often suffer from a lack of transparency and are prone to producing hallucinations. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{JERR}, a novel framework designed to enhance long-context comprehension via graph-based reasoning in LLMs. JERR integrates three key components: synopsis extraction, graph construction, and relational reasoning. First, synopsis is extracted by chunking text strategically, allowing the model to summarize and understand information more efficiently. Second, we build a directed acyclic graph (DAG) to resolve redundancy, ensuring logical consistency and clarity. Finally, we incorporate Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to help the model navigate complex reasoning paths, ensuring more accurate and interpretable outputs. This framework provides a novel solution that enables LLMs to handle extended contexts and complex reasoning tasks with improved reliability and transparency. Experimental results show that JERR consistently outperforms all baselines on the ROUGE and F1 metrics, achieving the highest scores on the LLM-Rater evaluation.

Sifan Li, Ming Tao, Hao Zhao et al.

Text-to-Image (T2I) has been prevalent in recent years, with most common condition tasks having been optimized nicely. Besides, counterfactual Text-to-Image is obstructing us from a more versatile AIGC experience. For those scenes that are impossible to happen in real world and anti-physics, we should spare no efforts in increasing the factual feel, which means synthesizing images that people think very likely to be happening, and concept alignment, which means all the required objects should be in the same frame. In this paper, we focus on concept alignment. As controllable T2I models have achieved satisfactory performance for real applications, we utilize this technology to replace the objects in a synthesized image in latent space step-by-step to change the image from a common scene to a counterfactual scene to meet the prompt. We propose a strategy to instruct this replacing process, which is called as Explicit Logical Narrative Prompt (ELNP), by using the newly SoTA language model DeepSeek to generate the instructions. Furthermore, to evaluate models' performance in counterfactual T2I, we design a metric to calculate how many required concepts in the prompt can be covered averagely in the synthesized images. The extensive experiments and qualitative comparisons demonstrate that our strategy can boost the concept alignment in counterfactual T2I.