Hongwei Xue

Yupan Huang, Hongwei Xue, Bei Liu et al.

We study the joint learning of image-to-text and text-to-image generations, which are naturally bi-directional tasks. Typical existing works design two separate task-specific models for each task, which impose expensive design efforts. In this work, we propose a unified image-and-text generative framework based on a single multimodal model to jointly study the bi-directional tasks. We adopt Transformer as our unified architecture for its strong performance and task-agnostic design. Specifically, we formulate both tasks as sequence generation tasks, where we represent images and text as unified sequences of tokens, and the Transformer learns multimodal interactions to generate sequences. We further propose two-level granularity feature representations and sequence-level training to improve the Transformer-based unified framework. Experiments show that our approach significantly improves previous Transformer-based model X-LXMERT's FID from 37.0 to 29.9 (lower is better) for text-to-image generation, and improves CIDEr-D score from 100.9% to 122.6% for fine-tuned image-to-text generation on the MS-COCO dataset. Our code is available online.

Shilin Yan, Jiaming Han, Joey Tsai et al.

The advent of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) has significantly enhanced Large Language Models (LLMs) to process and interpret diverse data modalities (e.g., image and video). However, as input complexity increases, particularly with long video sequences, the number of required tokens has grown significantly, leading to quadratically computational costs. This has made the efficient compression of video tokens in LMMs, while maintaining performance integrity, a pressing research challenge. In this paper, we introduce CrossLMM, decoupling long video sequences from LMMs via a dual cross-attention mechanism, which substantially reduces visual token quantity with minimal performance degradation. Specifically, we first implement a significant token reduction from pretrained visual encoders through a pooling methodology. Then, within LLM layers, we employ a visual-to-visual cross-attention mechanism, wherein the pooled visual tokens function as queries against the original visual token set. This module enables more efficient token utilization while retaining fine-grained informational fidelity. In addition, we introduce a text-to-visual cross-attention mechanism, for which the text tokens are enhanced through interaction with the original visual tokens, enriching the visual comprehension of the text tokens. Comprehensive empirical evaluation demonstrates that our approach achieves comparable or superior performance across diverse video-based LMM benchmarks, despite utilizing substantially fewer computational resources.

Hongwei Xue, Tiankai Hang, Yanhong Zeng et al.

We study joint video and language (VL) pre-training to enable cross-modality learning and benefit plentiful downstream VL tasks. Existing works either extract low-quality video features or learn limited text embedding, while neglecting that high-resolution videos and diversified semantics can significantly improve cross-modality learning. In this paper, we propose a novel High-resolution and Diversified VIdeo-LAnguage pre-training model (HD-VILA) for many visual tasks. In particular, we collect a large dataset with two distinct properties: 1) the first high-resolution dataset including 371.5k hours of 720p videos, and 2) the most diversified dataset covering 15 popular YouTube categories. To enable VL pre-training, we jointly optimize the HD-VILA model by a hybrid Transformer that learns rich spatiotemporal features, and a multimodal Transformer that enforces interactions of the learned video features with diversified texts. Our pre-training model achieves new state-of-the-art results in 10 VL understanding tasks and 2 more novel text-to-visual generation tasks. For example, we outperform SOTA models with relative increases of 40.4% R@1 in zero-shot MSR-VTT text-to-video retrieval task and 55.4% in high-resolution dataset LSMDC. The learned VL embedding is also effective in generating visually pleasing and semantically relevant results in text-to-visual editing and super-resolution tasks.

Hongwei Xue, Bei Liu, Huan Yang et al.

In this paper we focus on landscape animation, which aims to generate time-lapse videos from a single landscape image. Motion is crucial for landscape animation as it determines how objects move in videos. Existing methods are able to generate appealing videos by learning motion from real time-lapse videos. However, current methods suffer from inaccurate motion generation, which leads to unrealistic video results. To tackle this problem, we propose a model named FGLA to generate high-quality and realistic videos by learning Fine-Grained motion embedding for Landscape Animation. Our model consists of two parts: (1) a motion encoder which embeds time-lapse motion in a fine-grained way. (2) a motion generator which generates realistic motion to animate input images. To train and evaluate on diverse time-lapse videos, we build the largest high-resolution Time-lapse video dataset with Diverse scenes, namely Time-lapse-D, which includes 16,874 video clips with over 10 million frames. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method. In particular, our method achieves relative improvements by 19% on LIPIS and 5.6% on FVD compared with state-of-the-art methods on our dataset. A user study carried out with 700 human subjects shows that our approach visually outperforms existing methods by a large margin.

Hongwei Xue, Yupan Huang, Bei Liu et al.

Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) aims to learn multi-modal representations from image-text pairs and serves for downstream vision-language tasks in a fine-tuning fashion. The dominant VLP models adopt a CNN-Transformer architecture, which embeds images with a CNN, and then aligns images and text with a Transformer. Visual relationship between visual contents plays an important role in image understanding and is the basic for inter-modal alignment learning. However, CNNs have limitations in visual relation learning due to local receptive field's weakness in modeling long-range dependencies. Thus the two objectives of learning visual relation and inter-modal alignment are encapsulated in the same Transformer network. Such design might restrict the inter-modal alignment learning in the Transformer by ignoring the specialized characteristic of each objective. To tackle this, we propose a fully Transformer visual embedding for VLP to better learn visual relation and further promote inter-modal alignment. Specifically, we propose a metric named Inter-Modality Flow (IMF) to measure the interaction between vision and language modalities (i.e., inter-modality). We also design a novel masking optimization mechanism named Masked Feature Regression (MFR) in Transformer to further promote the inter-modality learning. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to explore the benefit of Transformer for visual feature learning in VLP. We verify our method on a wide range of vision-language tasks, including Image-Text Retrieval, Visual Question Answering (VQA), Visual Entailment and Visual Reasoning. Our approach not only outperforms the state-of-the-art VLP performance, but also shows benefits on the IMF metric.