Xiaodan Liang

Sihao Lin, Hongwei Xie, Bing Wang et al.

Knowledge distillation becomes a de facto standard to improve the performance of small neural networks. Most of the previous works propose to regress the representational features from the teacher to the student in a one-to-one spatial matching fashion. However, people tend to overlook the fact that, due to the architecture differences, the semantic information on the same spatial location usually vary. This greatly undermines the underlying assumption of the one-to-one distillation approach. To this end, we propose a novel one-to-all spatial matching knowledge distillation approach. Specifically, we allow each pixel of the teacher feature to be distilled to all spatial locations of the student features given its similarity, which is generated from a target-aware transformer. Our approach surpasses the state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin on various computer vision benchmarks, such as ImageNet, Pascal VOC and COCOStuff10k. Code is available at https://github.com/sihaoevery/TaT.

Yang Liu, Weixing Chen, Yongjie Bai et al.

Embodied Artificial Intelligence (Embodied AI) is crucial for achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and serves as a foundation for various applications (e.g., intelligent mechatronics systems, smart manufacturing) that bridge cyberspace and the physical world. Recently, the emergence of Multi-modal Large Models (MLMs) and World Models (WMs) have attracted significant attention due to their remarkable perception, interaction, and reasoning capabilities, making them a promising architecture for embodied agents. In this survey, we give a comprehensive exploration of the latest advancements in Embodied AI. Our analysis firstly navigates through the forefront of representative works of embodied robots and simulators, to fully understand the research focuses and their limitations. Then, we analyze four main research targets: 1) embodied perception, 2) embodied interaction, 3) embodied agent, and 4) sim-to-real adaptation, covering state-of-the-art methods, essential paradigms, and comprehensive datasets. Additionally, we explore the complexities of MLMs in virtual and real embodied agents, highlighting their significance in facilitating interactions in digital and physical environments. Finally, we summarize the challenges and limitations of embodied AI and discuss potential future directions. We hope this survey will serve as a foundational reference for the research community. The associated project can be found at https://github.com/HCPLab-SYSU/Embodied_AI_Paper_List.

Kaicheng Yu, Tang Tao, Hongwei Xie et al. · pku

There are two critical sensors for 3D perception in autonomous driving, the camera and the LiDAR. The camera provides rich semantic information such as color, texture, and the LiDAR reflects the 3D shape and locations of surrounding objects. People discover that fusing these two modalities can significantly boost the performance of 3D perception models as each modality has complementary information to the other. However, we observe that current datasets are captured from expensive vehicles that are explicitly designed for data collection purposes, and cannot truly reflect the realistic data distribution due to various reasons. To this end, we collect a series of real-world cases with noisy data distribution, and systematically formulate a robustness benchmark toolkit, that simulates these cases on any clean autonomous driving datasets. We showcase the effectiveness of our toolkit by establishing the robustness benchmark on two widely-adopted autonomous driving datasets, nuScenes and Waymo, then, to the best of our knowledge, holistically benchmark the state-of-the-art fusion methods for the first time. We observe that: i) most fusion methods, when solely developed on these data, tend to fail inevitably when there is a disruption to the LiDAR input; ii) the improvement of the camera input is significantly inferior to the LiDAR one. We further propose an efficient robust training strategy to improve the robustness of the current fusion method. The benchmark and code are available at https://github.com/kcyu2014/lidar-camera-robust-benchmark

Hongguang Zhu, Yunchao Wei, Xiaodan Liang et al.

Vision-Language Pretraining (VLP) has shown impressive results on diverse downstream tasks by offline training on large-scale datasets. Regarding the growing nature of real-world data, such an offline training paradigm on ever-expanding data is unsustainable, because models lack the continual learning ability to accumulate knowledge constantly. However, most continual learning studies are limited to uni-modal classification and existing multi-modal datasets cannot simulate continual non-stationary data stream scenarios. To support the study of Vision-Language Continual Pretraining (VLCP), we first contribute a comprehensive and unified benchmark dataset P9D which contains over one million product image-text pairs from 9 industries. The data from each industry as an independent task supports continual learning and conforms to the real-world long-tail nature to simulate pretraining on web data. We comprehensively study the characteristics and challenges of VLCP, and propose a new algorithm: Compatible momentum contrast with Topology Preservation, dubbed CTP. The compatible momentum model absorbs the knowledge of the current and previous-task models to flexibly update the modal feature. Moreover, Topology Preservation transfers the knowledge of embedding across tasks while preserving the flexibility of feature adjustment. The experimental results demonstrate our method not only achieves superior performance compared with other baselines but also does not bring an expensive training burden. Dataset and codes are available at https://github.com/KevinLight831/CTP.

Changlin Li, Bohan Zhuang, Guangrun Wang et al.

Recent advances in vision Transformers (ViTs) have come with a voracious appetite for computing power, high-lighting the urgent need to develop efficient training methods for ViTs. Progressive learning, a training scheme where the model capacity grows progressively during training, has started showing its ability in efficient training. In this paper, we take a practical step towards efficient training of ViTs by customizing and automating progressive learning. First, we develop a strong manual baseline for progressive learning of ViTs, by introducing momentum growth (MoGrow) to bridge the gap brought by model growth. Then, we propose automated progressive learning (AutoProg), an efficient training scheme that aims to achieve lossless acceleration by automatically increasing the training overload on-the-fly; this is achieved by adaptively deciding whether, where and how much should the model grow during progressive learning. Specifically, we first relax the optimization of the growth schedule to sub-network architecture optimization problem, then propose one-shot estimation of the sub-network performance via an elastic supernet. The searching overhead is reduced to minimal by recycling the parameters of the supernet. Extensive experiments of efficient training on ImageNet with two representative ViT models, DeiT and VOLO, demonstrate that AutoProg can accelerate ViTs training by up to 85.1% with no performance drop. Code: https://github.com/changlin31/AutoProg

Siyi Hu, Yifan Zhong, Minquan Gao et al.

A significant challenge facing researchers in the area of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) pertains to the identification of a library that can offer fast and compatible development for multi-agent tasks and algorithm combinations, while obviating the need to consider compatibility issues. In this paper, we present MARLlib, a library designed to address the aforementioned challenge by leveraging three key mechanisms: 1) a standardized multi-agent environment wrapper, 2) an agent-level algorithm implementation, and 3) a flexible policy mapping strategy. By utilizing these mechanisms, MARLlib can effectively disentangle the intertwined nature of the multi-agent task and the learning process of the algorithm, with the ability to automatically alter the training strategy based on the current task's attributes. The MARLlib library's source code is publicly accessible on GitHub: \url{https://github.com/Replicable-MARL/MARLlib}.

Haoyuan Li, Haoye Dong, Hanchao Jia et al.

Multi-person 3D mesh recovery from videos is a critical first step towards automatic perception of group behavior in virtual reality, physical therapy and beyond. However, existing approaches rely on multi-stage paradigms, where the person detection and tracking stages are performed in a multi-person setting, while temporal dynamics are only modeled for one person at a time. Consequently, their performance is severely limited by the lack of inter-person interactions in the spatial-temporal mesh recovery, as well as by detection and tracking defects. To address these challenges, we propose the Coordinate transFormer (CoordFormer) that directly models multi-person spatial-temporal relations and simultaneously performs multi-mesh recovery in an end-to-end manner. Instead of partitioning the feature map into coarse-scale patch-wise tokens, CoordFormer leverages a novel Coordinate-Aware Attention to preserve pixel-level spatial-temporal coordinate information. Additionally, we propose a simple, yet effective Body Center Attention mechanism to fuse position information. Extensive experiments on the 3DPW dataset demonstrate that CoordFormer significantly improves the state-of-the-art, outperforming the previously best results by 4.2%, 8.8% and 4.7% according to the MPJPE, PAMPJPE, and PVE metrics, respectively, while being 40% faster than recent video-based approaches. The released code can be found at https://github.com/Li-Hao-yuan/CoordFormer.

Yi Cheng, Wenge Liu, Wenjie Li et al.

Providing Emotional Support (ES) to soothe people in emotional distress is an essential capability in social interactions. Most existing researches on building ES conversation systems only considered single-turn interactions with users, which was over-simplified. In comparison, multi-turn ES conversation systems can provide ES more effectively, but face several new technical challenges, including: (1) how to adopt appropriate support strategies to achieve the long-term dialogue goal of comforting the user's emotion; (2) how to dynamically model the user's state. In this paper, we propose a novel system MultiESC to address these issues. For strategy planning, drawing inspiration from the A* search algorithm, we propose lookahead heuristics to estimate the future user feedback after using particular strategies, which helps to select strategies that can lead to the best long-term effects. For user state modeling, MultiESC focuses on capturing users' subtle emotional expressions and understanding their emotion causes. Extensive experiments show that MultiESC significantly outperforms competitive baselines in both dialogue generation and strategy planning. Our codes are available at https://github.com/lwgkzl/MultiESC.

Zhicheng Yang, Jinghui Qin, Jiaqi Chen et al.

Recently, deep learning models have made great progress in MWP solving on answer accuracy. However, they are uninterpretable since they mainly rely on shallow heuristics to achieve high performance without understanding and reasoning the grounded math logic. To address this issue and make a step towards interpretable MWP solving, we first construct a high-quality MWP dataset named InterMWP which consists of 11,495 MWPs and annotates interpretable logical formulas based on algebraic knowledge as the grounded linguistic logic of each solution equation. Different from existing MWP datasets, our InterMWP benchmark asks for a solver to not only output the solution expressions but also predict the corresponding logical formulas. We further propose a novel approach with logical prompt and interpretation generation, called LogicSolver. For each MWP, our LogicSolver first retrieves some highly-correlated algebraic knowledge and then passes them to the backbone model as prompts to improve the semantic representations of MWPs. With these improved semantic representations, our LogicSolver generates corresponding solution expressions and interpretable knowledge formulas in accord with the generated solution expressions, simultaneously. Experimental results show that our LogicSolver has stronger logical formula-based interpretability than baselines while achieving higher answer accuracy with the help of logical prompts, simultaneously. The source code and dataset is available at https://github.com/yangzhch6/InterMWP.

Kai Chen, Yunhao Gou, Runhui Huang et al.

GPT-4o, an omni-modal model that enables vocal conversations with diverse emotions and tones, marks a milestone for omni-modal foundation models. However, empowering Large Language Models to perceive and generate images, texts, and speeches end-to-end with publicly available data remains challenging for the open-source community. Existing vision-language models rely on external tools for speech processing, while speech-language models still suffer from limited or totally without vision-understanding capabilities. To address this gap, we propose the EMOVA (EMotionally Omni-present Voice Assistant), to enable Large Language Models with end-to-end speech abilities while maintaining the leading vision-language performance. With a semantic-acoustic disentangled speech tokenizer, we surprisingly notice that omni-modal alignment can further enhance vision-language and speech abilities compared with the bi-modal aligned counterparts. Moreover, a lightweight style module is introduced for the flexible speech style controls including emotions and pitches. For the first time, EMOVA achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the vision-language and speech benchmarks, and meanwhile, supporting omni-modal spoken dialogue with vivid emotions.

Xujie Zhang, Yu Sha, Michael C. Kampffmeyer et al.

Cross-modal fashion image synthesis has emerged as one of the most promising directions in the generation domain due to the vast untapped potential of incorporating multiple modalities and the wide range of fashion image applications. To facilitate accurate generation, cross-modal synthesis methods typically rely on Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) to align textual and garment information. In this work, we argue that simply aligning texture and garment information is not sufficient to capture the semantics of the visual information and therefore propose MaskCLIP. MaskCLIP decomposes the garments into semantic parts, ensuring fine-grained and semantically accurate alignment between the visual and text information. Building on MaskCLIP, we propose ARMANI, a unified cross-modal fashion designer with part-level garment-text alignment. ARMANI discretizes an image into uniform tokens based on a learned cross-modal codebook in its first stage and uses a Transformer to model the distribution of image tokens for a real image given the tokens of the control signals in its second stage. Contrary to prior approaches that also rely on two-stage paradigms, ARMANI introduces textual tokens into the codebook, making it possible for the model to utilize fine-grain semantic information to generate more realistic images. Further, by introducing a cross-modal Transformer, ARMANI is versatile and can accomplish image synthesis from various control signals, such as pure text, sketch images, and partial images. Extensive experiments conducted on our newly collected cross-modal fashion dataset demonstrate that ARMANI generates photo-realistic images in diverse synthesis tasks and outperforms existing state-of-the-art cross-modal image synthesis approaches.Our code is available at https://github.com/Harvey594/ARMANI.

Cuican Yu, Guansong Lu, Yihan Zeng et al. · tsinghua

Generating 3D faces from textual descriptions has a multitude of applications, such as gaming, movie, and robotics. Recent progresses have demonstrated the success of unconditional 3D face generation and text-to-3D shape generation. However, due to the limited text-3D face data pairs, text-driven 3D face generation remains an open problem. In this paper, we propose a text-guided 3D faces generation method, refer as TG-3DFace, for generating realistic 3D faces using text guidance. Specifically, we adopt an unconditional 3D face generation framework and equip it with text conditions, which learns the text-guided 3D face generation with only text-2D face data. On top of that, we propose two text-to-face cross-modal alignment techniques, including the global contrastive learning and the fine-grained alignment module, to facilitate high semantic consistency between generated 3D faces and input texts. Besides, we present directional classifier guidance during the inference process, which encourages creativity for out-of-domain generations. Compared to the existing methods, TG-3DFace creates more realistic and aesthetically pleasing 3D faces, boosting 9% multi-view consistency (MVIC) over Latent3D. The rendered face images generated by TG-3DFace achieve higher FID and CLIP score than text-to-2D face/image generation models, demonstrating our superiority in generating realistic and semantic-consistent textures.

Hao Wang, Pengzhen Ren, Zequn Jie et al.

Open-vocabulary detection is a challenging task due to the requirement of detecting objects based on class names, including those not encountered during training. Existing methods have shown strong zero-shot detection capabilities through pre-training and pseudo-labeling on diverse large-scale datasets. However, these approaches encounter two main challenges: (i) how to effectively eliminate data noise from pseudo-labeling, and (ii) how to efficiently leverage the language-aware capability for region-level cross-modality fusion and alignment. To address these challenges, we propose a novel unified open-vocabulary detection method called OV-DINO, which is pre-trained on diverse large-scale datasets with language-aware selective fusion in a unified framework. Specifically, we introduce a Unified Data Integration (UniDI) pipeline to enable end-to-end training and eliminate noise from pseudo-label generation by unifying different data sources into detection-centric data format. In addition, we propose a Language-Aware Selective Fusion (LASF) module to enhance the cross-modality alignment through a language-aware query selection and fusion process. We evaluate the performance of the proposed OV-DINO on popular open-vocabulary detection benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art results with an AP of 50.6% on the COCO benchmark and 40.1% on the LVIS benchmark in a zero-shot manner, demonstrating its strong generalization ability. Furthermore, the fine-tuned OV-DINO on COCO achieves 58.4% AP, outperforming many existing methods with the same backbone. The code for OV-DINO is available at https://github.com/wanghao9610/OV-DINO.

Wenge Liu, Yi Cheng, Hao Wang et al.

With the rise of telemedicine, the task of developing Dialogue Systems for Medical Diagnosis (DSMD) has received much attention in recent years. Different from early researches that needed to rely on extra human resources and expertise to help construct the system, recent researches focused on how to build DSMD in a purely data-driven manner. However, the previous data-driven DSMD methods largely overlooked the system interpretability, which is critical for a medical application, and they also suffered from the data sparsity issue at the same time. In this paper, we explore how to bring interpretability to data-driven DSMD. Specifically, we propose a more interpretable decision process to implement the dialogue manager of DSMD by reasonably mimicking real doctors' inquiry logics, and we devise a model with highly transparent components to conduct the inference. Moreover, we collect a new DSMD dataset, which has a much larger scale, more diverse patterns and is of higher quality than the existing ones. The experiments show that our method obtains 7.7%, 10.0%, 3.0% absolute improvement in diagnosis accuracy respectively on three datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of its rational decision process and model design. Our codes and the GMD-12 dataset are available at https://github.com/lwgkzl/BR-Agent.

Zhicheng Yang, Yiwei Wang, Yinya Huang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited their problem-solving abilities in mathematical reasoning. Solving realistic optimization (OPT) problems in application scenarios requires advanced and applied mathematics ability. However, current OPT benchmarks that merely solve linear programming are far from complex realistic situations. In this work, we propose OptiBench, a benchmark for End-to-end optimization problem-solving with human-readable inputs and outputs. OptiBench contains rich optimization problems, including linear and nonlinear programming with or without tabular data, which can comprehensively evaluate LLMs' solving ability. In our benchmark, LLMs are required to call a code solver to provide precise numerical answers. Furthermore, to alleviate the data scarcity for optimization problems, and to bridge the gap between open-source LLMs on a small scale (e.g., Llama-3-8b) and closed-source LLMs (e.g., GPT-4), we further propose a data synthesis method namely ReSocratic. Unlike general data synthesis methods that proceed from questions to answers, \ReSocratic first incrementally synthesizes formatted optimization demonstration with mathematical formulations step by step and then back-translates the generated demonstrations into questions. Based on this, we synthesize the ReSocratic-29k dataset. We further conduct supervised fine-tuning with ReSocratic-29k on multiple open-source models. Experimental results show that ReSocratic-29k significantly improves the performance of open-source models.

Jing Xiong, Jianhao Shen, Ye Yuan et al.

Automated theorem proving (ATP) has become an appealing domain for exploring the reasoning ability of the recent successful generative language models. However, current ATP benchmarks mainly focus on symbolic inference, but rarely involve the understanding of complex number combination reasoning. In this work, we propose TRIGO, an ATP benchmark that not only requires a model to reduce a trigonometric expression with step-by-step proofs but also evaluates a generative LM's reasoning ability on formulas and its capability to manipulate, group, and factor number terms. We gather trigonometric expressions and their reduced forms from the web, annotate the simplification process manually, and translate it into the Lean formal language system. We then automatically generate additional examples from the annotated samples to expand the dataset. Furthermore, we develop an automatic generator based on Lean-Gym to create dataset splits of varying difficulties and distributions in order to thoroughly analyze the model's generalization ability. Our extensive experiments show our proposed TRIGO poses a new challenge for advanced generative LM's including GPT-4 which is pre-trained on a considerable amount of open-source formal theorem-proving language data, and provide a new tool to study the generative LM's ability on both formal and mathematical reasoning.

Lewei Yao, Jianhua Han, Youpeng Wen et al.

Open-world object detection, as a more general and challenging goal, aims to recognize and localize objects described by arbitrary category names. The recent work GLIP formulates this problem as a grounding problem by concatenating all category names of detection datasets into sentences, which leads to inefficient interaction between category names. This paper presents DetCLIP, a paralleled visual-concept pre-training method for open-world detection by resorting to knowledge enrichment from a designed concept dictionary. To achieve better learning efficiency, we propose a novel paralleled concept formulation that extracts concepts separately to better utilize heterogeneous datasets (i.e., detection, grounding, and image-text pairs) for training. We further design a concept dictionary~(with descriptions) from various online sources and detection datasets to provide prior knowledge for each concept. By enriching the concepts with their descriptions, we explicitly build the relationships among various concepts to facilitate the open-domain learning. The proposed concept dictionary is further used to provide sufficient negative concepts for the construction of the word-region alignment loss\, and to complete labels for objects with missing descriptions in captions of image-text pair data. The proposed framework demonstrates strong zero-shot detection performances, e.g., on the LVIS dataset, our DetCLIP-T outperforms GLIP-T by 9.9% mAP and obtains a 13.5% improvement on rare categories compared to the fully-supervised model with the same backbone as ours.

Zhicheng Yang, Jinghui Qin, Jiaqi Chen et al.

In this paper, we revisit the solving bias when evaluating models on current Math Word Problem (MWP) benchmarks. However, current solvers exist solving bias which consists of data bias and learning bias due to biased dataset and improper training strategy. Our experiments verify MWP solvers are easy to be biased by the biased training datasets which do not cover diverse questions for each problem narrative of all MWPs, thus a solver can only learn shallow heuristics rather than deep semantics for understanding problems. Besides, an MWP can be naturally solved by multiple equivalent equations while current datasets take only one of the equivalent equations as ground truth, forcing the model to match the labeled ground truth and ignoring other equivalent equations. Here, we first introduce a novel MWP dataset named UnbiasedMWP which is constructed by varying the grounded expressions in our collected data and annotating them with corresponding multiple new questions manually. Then, to further mitigate learning bias, we propose a Dynamic Target Selection (DTS) Strategy to dynamically select more suitable target expressions according to the longest prefix match between the current model output and candidate equivalent equations which are obtained by applying commutative law during training. The results show that our UnbiasedMWP has significantly fewer biases than its original data and other datasets, posing a promising benchmark for fairly evaluating the solvers' reasoning skills rather than matching nearest neighbors. And the solvers trained with our DTS achieve higher accuracies on multiple MWP benchmarks. The source code is available at https://github.com/yangzhch6/UnbiasedMWP.

Guian Fang, Wenbiao Yan, Yuanfan Guo et al.

Text-to-image diffusion models have significantly advanced in conditional image generation. However, these models usually struggle with accurately rendering images featuring humans, resulting in distorted limbs and other anomalies. This issue primarily stems from the insufficient recognition and evaluation of limb qualities in diffusion models. To address this issue, we introduce AbHuman, the first large-scale synthesized human benchmark focusing on anatomical anomalies. This benchmark consists of 56K synthesized human images, each annotated with detailed, bounding-box level labels identifying 147K human anomalies in 18 different categories. Based on this, the recognition of human anomalies can be established, which in turn enhances image generation through traditional techniques such as negative prompting and guidance. To further boost the improvement, we propose HumanRefiner, a novel plug-and-play approach for the coarse-to-fine refinement of human anomalies in text-to-image generation. Specifically, HumanRefiner utilizes a self-diagnostic procedure to detect and correct issues related to both coarse-grained abnormal human poses and fine-grained anomaly levels, facilitating pose-reversible diffusion generation. Experimental results on the AbHuman benchmark demonstrate that HumanRefiner significantly reduces generative discrepancies, achieving a 2.9x improvement in limb quality compared to the state-of-the-art open-source generator SDXL and a 1.4x improvement over DALL-E 3 in human evaluations. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/Enderfga/HumanRefiner.

Tao Tang, Changlin Li, Guangrun Wang et al.

Automatic data augmentation (AutoAugment) strategies are indispensable in supervised data-efficient training protocols of vision transformers, and have led to state-of-the-art results in supervised learning. Despite the success, its development and application on self-supervised vision transformers have been hindered by several barriers, including the high search cost, the lack of supervision, and the unsuitable search space. In this work, we propose AutoView, a self-regularized adversarial AutoAugment method, to learn views for self-supervised vision transformers, by addressing the above barriers. First, we reduce the search cost of AutoView to nearly zero by learning views and network parameters simultaneously in a single forward-backward step, minimizing and maximizing the mutual information among different augmented views, respectively. Then, to avoid information collapse caused by the lack of label supervision, we propose a self-regularized loss term to guarantee the information propagation. Additionally, we present a curated augmentation policy search space for self-supervised learning, by modifying the generally used search space designed for supervised learning. On ImageNet, our AutoView achieves remarkable improvement over RandAug baseline (+10.2% k-NN accuracy), and consistently outperforms sota manually tuned view policy by a clear margin (up to +1.3% k-NN accuracy). Extensive experiments show that AutoView pretraining also benefits downstream tasks (+1.2% mAcc on ADE20K Semantic Segmentation and +2.8% mAP on revisited Oxford Image Retrieval benchmark) and improves model robustness (+2.3% Top-1 Acc on ImageNet-A and +1.0% AUPR on ImageNet-O). Code and models will be available at https://github.com/Trent-tangtao/AutoView.

Mingjie Li, Bingqian Lin, Zicong Chen et al.

Automatic radiology reporting has great clinical potential to relieve radiologists from heavy workloads and improve diagnosis interpretation. Recently, researchers have enhanced data-driven neural networks with medical knowledge graphs to eliminate the severe visual and textual bias in this task. The structures of such graphs are exploited by using the clinical dependencies formed by the disease topic tags via general knowledge and usually do not update during the training process. Consequently, the fixed graphs can not guarantee the most appropriate scope of knowledge and limit the effectiveness. To address the limitation, we propose a knowledge graph with Dynamic structure and nodes to facilitate medical report generation with Contrastive Learning, named DCL. In detail, the fundamental structure of our graph is pre-constructed from general knowledge. Then we explore specific knowledge extracted from the retrieved reports to add additional nodes or redefine their relations in a bottom-up manner. Each image feature is integrated with its very own updated graph before being fed into the decoder module for report generation. Finally, this paper introduces Image-Report Contrastive and Image-Report Matching losses to better represent visual features and textual information. Evaluated on IU-Xray and MIMIC-CXR datasets, our DCL outperforms previous state-of-the-art models on these two benchmarks.

Lewei Yao, Jianhua Han, Xiaodan Liang et al.

This paper presents DetCLIPv2, an efficient and scalable training framework that incorporates large-scale image-text pairs to achieve open-vocabulary object detection (OVD). Unlike previous OVD frameworks that typically rely on a pre-trained vision-language model (e.g., CLIP) or exploit image-text pairs via a pseudo labeling process, DetCLIPv2 directly learns the fine-grained word-region alignment from massive image-text pairs in an end-to-end manner. To accomplish this, we employ a maximum word-region similarity between region proposals and textual words to guide the contrastive objective. To enable the model to gain localization capability while learning broad concepts, DetCLIPv2 is trained with a hybrid supervision from detection, grounding and image-text pair data under a unified data formulation. By jointly training with an alternating scheme and adopting low-resolution input for image-text pairs, DetCLIPv2 exploits image-text pair data efficiently and effectively: DetCLIPv2 utilizes 13X more image-text pairs than DetCLIP with a similar training time and improves performance. With 13M image-text pairs for pre-training, DetCLIPv2 demonstrates superior open-vocabulary detection performance, e.g., DetCLIPv2 with Swin-T backbone achieves 40.4% zero-shot AP on the LVIS benchmark, which outperforms previous works GLIP/GLIPv2/DetCLIP by 14.4/11.4/4.5% AP, respectively, and even beats its fully-supervised counterpart by a large margin.

Kaican Li, Kai Chen, Haoyu Wang et al.

Contemporary deep-learning object detection methods for autonomous driving usually assume prefixed categories of common traffic participants, such as pedestrians and cars. Most existing detectors are unable to detect uncommon objects and corner cases (e.g., a dog crossing a street), which may lead to severe accidents in some situations, making the timeline for the real-world application of reliable autonomous driving uncertain. One main reason that impedes the development of truly reliably self-driving systems is the lack of public datasets for evaluating the performance of object detectors on corner cases. Hence, we introduce a challenging dataset named CODA that exposes this critical problem of vision-based detectors. The dataset consists of 1500 carefully selected real-world driving scenes, each containing four object-level corner cases (on average), spanning more than 30 object categories. On CODA, the performance of standard object detectors trained on large-scale autonomous driving datasets significantly drops to no more than 12.8% in mAR. Moreover, we experiment with the state-of-the-art open-world object detector and find that it also fails to reliably identify the novel objects in CODA, suggesting that a robust perception system for autonomous driving is probably still far from reach. We expect our CODA dataset to facilitate further research in reliable detection for real-world autonomous driving. Our dataset will be released at https://coda-dataset.github.io.

Xipeng Chen, Guangrun Wang, Dizhong Zhu et al.

3D Garment modeling is a critical and challenging topic in the area of computer vision and graphics, with increasing attention focused on garment representation learning, garment reconstruction, and controllable garment manipulation, whereas existing methods were constrained to model garments under specific categories or with relatively simple topologies. In this paper, we propose a novel Neural Sewing Machine (NSM), a learning-based framework for structure-preserving 3D garment modeling, which is capable of learning representations for garments with diverse shapes and topologies and is successfully applied to 3D garment reconstruction and controllable manipulation. To model generic garments, we first obtain sewing pattern embedding via a unified sewing pattern encoding module, as the sewing pattern can accurately describe the intrinsic structure and the topology of the 3D garment. Then we use a 3D garment decoder to decode the sewing pattern embedding into a 3D garment using the UV-position maps with masks. To preserve the intrinsic structure of the predicted 3D garment, we introduce an inner-panel structure-preserving loss, an inter-panel structure-preserving loss, and a surface-normal loss in the learning process of our framework. We evaluate NSM on the public 3D garment dataset with sewing patterns with diverse garment shapes and categories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed NSM is capable of representing 3D garments under diverse garment shapes and topologies, realistically reconstructing 3D garments from 2D images with the preserved structure, and accurately manipulating the 3D garment categories, shapes, and topologies, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods by a clear margin.

Quande Liu, Youpeng Wen, Jianhua Han et al.

To bridge the gap between supervised semantic segmentation and real-world applications that acquires one model to recognize arbitrary new concepts, recent zero-shot segmentation attracts a lot of attention by exploring the relationships between unseen and seen object categories, yet requiring large amounts of densely-annotated data with diverse base classes. In this paper, we propose a new open-world semantic segmentation pipeline that makes the first attempt to learn to segment semantic objects of various open-world categories without any efforts on dense annotations, by purely exploiting the image-caption data that naturally exist on the Internet. Our method, Vision-language-driven Semantic Segmentation (ViL-Seg), employs an image and a text encoder to generate visual and text embeddings for the image-caption data, with two core components that endow its segmentation ability: First, the image encoder is jointly trained with a vision-based contrasting and a cross-modal contrasting, which encourage the visual embeddings to preserve both fine-grained semantics and high-level category information that are crucial for the segmentation task. Furthermore, an online clustering head is devised over the image encoder, which allows to dynamically segment the visual embeddings into distinct semantic groups such that they can be classified by comparing with various text embeddings to complete our segmentation pipeline. Experiments show that without using any data with dense annotations, our method can directly segment objects of arbitrary categories, outperforming zero-shot segmentation methods that require data labeling on three benchmark datasets.

Tang Tao, Longfei Gao, Guangrun Wang et al.

We introduce a new task, novel view synthesis for LiDAR sensors. While traditional model-based LiDAR simulators with style-transfer neural networks can be applied to render novel views, they fall short of producing accurate and realistic LiDAR patterns because the renderers rely on explicit 3D reconstruction and exploit game engines, that ignore important attributes of LiDAR points. We address this challenge by formulating, to the best of our knowledge, the first differentiable end-to-end LiDAR rendering framework, LiDAR-NeRF, leveraging a neural radiance field (NeRF) to facilitate the joint learning of geometry and the attributes of 3D points. However, simply employing NeRF cannot achieve satisfactory results, as it only focuses on learning individual pixels while ignoring local information, especially at low texture areas, resulting in poor geometry. To this end, we have taken steps to address this issue by introducing a structural regularization method to preserve local structural details. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we establish an object-centric multi-view LiDAR dataset, dubbed NeRF-MVL. It contains observations of objects from 9 categories seen from 360-degree viewpoints captured with multiple LiDAR sensors. Our extensive experiments on the scene-level KITTI-360 dataset, and on our object-level NeRF-MVL show that our LiDAR-NeRF surpasses the model-based algorithms significantly.

Yanxin Long, Youpeng Wen, Jianhua Han et al.

Benefiting from large-scale vision-language pre-training on image-text pairs, open-world detection methods have shown superior generalization ability under the zero-shot or few-shot detection settings. However, a pre-defined category space is still required during the inference stage of existing methods and only the objects belonging to that space will be predicted. To introduce a "real" open-world detector, in this paper, we propose a novel method named CapDet to either predict under a given category list or directly generate the category of predicted bounding boxes. Specifically, we unify the open-world detection and dense caption tasks into a single yet effective framework by introducing an additional dense captioning head to generate the region-grounded captions. Besides, adding the captioning task will in turn benefit the generalization of detection performance since the captioning dataset covers more concepts. Experiment results show that by unifying the dense caption task, our CapDet has obtained significant performance improvements (e.g., +2.1% mAP on LVIS rare classes) over the baseline method on LVIS (1203 classes). Besides, our CapDet also achieves state-of-the-art performance on dense captioning tasks, e.g., 15.44% mAP on VG V1.2 and 13.98% on the VG-COCO dataset.

Guangyi Liu, Zeyu Feng, Yuan Gao et al.

Real-world text applications often involve composing a wide range of text control operations, such as editing the text w.r.t. an attribute, manipulating keywords and structure, and generating new text of desired properties. Prior work typically learns/finetunes a language model (LM) to perform individual or specific subsets of operations. Recent research has studied combining operations in a plug-and-play manner, often with costly search or optimization in the complex sequence space. This paper proposes a new efficient approach for composable text operations in the compact latent space of text. The low-dimensionality and differentiability of the text latent vector allow us to develop an efficient sampler based on ordinary differential equations (ODEs) given arbitrary plug-in operators (e.g., attribute classifiers). By connecting pretrained LMs (e.g., GPT2) to the latent space through efficient adaption, we then decode the sampled vectors into desired text sequences. The flexible approach permits diverse control operators (sentiment, tense, formality, keywords, etc.) acquired using any relevant data from different domains. Experiments show that composing those operators within our approach manages to generate or edit high-quality text, substantially improving over previous methods in terms of generation quality and efficiency.

Pengzhen Ren, Changlin Li, Hang Xu et al.

Recently, great success has been made in learning visual representations from text supervision, facilitating the emergence of text-supervised semantic segmentation. However, existing works focus on pixel grouping and cross-modal semantic alignment, while ignoring the correspondence among multiple augmented views of the same image. To overcome such limitation, we propose multi-\textbf{View} \textbf{Co}nsistent learning (ViewCo) for text-supervised semantic segmentation. Specifically, we first propose text-to-views consistency modeling to learn correspondence for multiple views of the same input image. Additionally, we propose cross-view segmentation consistency modeling to address the ambiguity issue of text supervision by contrasting the segment features of Siamese visual encoders. The text-to-views consistency benefits the dense assignment of the visual features by encouraging different crops to align with the same text, while the cross-view segmentation consistency modeling provides additional self-supervision, overcoming the limitation of ambiguous text supervision for segmentation masks. Trained with large-scale image-text data, our model can directly segment objects of arbitrary categories in a zero-shot manner. Extensive experiments show that ViewCo outperforms state-of-the-art methods on average by up to 2.9\%, 1.6\%, and 2.4\% mIoU on PASCAL VOC2012, PASCAL Context, and COCO, respectively.

Mingjie Li, Wenjia Cai, Karin Verspoor et al.

Automatic generation of ophthalmic reports using data-driven neural networks has great potential in clinical practice. When writing a report, ophthalmologists make inferences with prior clinical knowledge. This knowledge has been neglected in prior medical report generation methods. To endow models with the capability of incorporating expert knowledge, we propose a Cross-modal clinical Graph Transformer (CGT) for ophthalmic report generation (ORG), in which clinical relation triples are injected into the visual features as prior knowledge to drive the decoding procedure. However, two major common Knowledge Noise (KN) issues may affect models' effectiveness. 1) Existing general biomedical knowledge bases such as the UMLS may not align meaningfully to the specific context and language of the report, limiting their utility for knowledge injection. 2) Incorporating too much knowledge may divert the visual features from their correct meaning. To overcome these limitations, we design an automatic information extraction scheme based on natural language processing to obtain clinical entities and relations directly from in-domain training reports. Given a set of ophthalmic images, our CGT first restores a sub-graph from the clinical graph and injects the restored triples into visual features. Then visible matrix is employed during the encoding procedure to limit the impact of knowledge. Finally, reports are predicted by the encoded cross-modal features via a Transformer decoder. Extensive experiments on the large-scale FFA-IR benchmark demonstrate that the proposed CGT is able to outperform previous benchmark methods and achieve state-of-the-art performances.

Yinya Huang, Ruixin Hong, Hongming Zhang et al.

In this study, we delve into the realm of counterfactual reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Our primary objective is to cultivate the counterfactual thought processes within LLMs and rigorously assess these processes for their validity. Specifically, we introduce a novel task, Counterfactual Logical Modification (CLOMO), and a high-quality human-annotated benchmark. In this task, LLMs must adeptly alter a given argumentative text to uphold a predetermined logical relationship. To effectively evaluate a generation model's counterfactual capabilities, we propose an innovative evaluation metric, the decomposed Self-Evaluation Score (SES) to directly evaluate the natural language output of LLMs instead of modeling the task as a multiple-choice problem. Analysis shows that the proposed automatic metric aligns well with human preference. Our experimental results show that while LLMs demonstrate a notable capacity for logical counterfactual thinking, there remains a discernible gap between their current abilities and human performance. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Eleanor-H/CLOMO.

Jiahui Gao, Renjie Pi, Yong Lin et al.

There is a rising interest in further exploring the zero-shot learning potential of large pre-trained language models (PLMs). A new paradigm called data-generation-based zero-shot learning has achieved impressive success. In this paradigm, the synthesized data from the PLM acts as the carrier of knowledge, which is used to train a task-specific model with orders of magnitude fewer parameters than the PLM, achieving both higher performance and efficiency than prompt-based zero-shot learning methods on PLMs. The main hurdle of this approach is that the synthesized data from PLM usually contains a significant portion of low-quality samples. Fitting on such data will greatly hamper the performance of the task-specific model, making it unreliable for deployment. Previous methods remedy this issue mainly by filtering synthetic data using heuristic metrics(e.g., output confidence), or refining the data with the help of a human expert, which comes with excessive manual tuning or expensive costs. In this paper, we propose a novel noise-robust re-weighting framework SunGen to automatically construct high-quality data for zero-shot classification problems. Our framework features the ability to learn the sample weights indicating data quality without requiring any human annotation. We theoretically and empirically verify the ability of our method to help construct good-quality synthetic datasets. Notably, SunGen-LSTM yields a 9.8% relative improvement than the baseline on average accuracy across eight different established text classification tasks.

Jianhua Han, Xiajun Deng, Xinyue Cai et al.

We present Laneformer, a conceptually simple yet powerful transformer-based architecture tailored for lane detection that is a long-standing research topic for visual perception in autonomous driving. The dominant paradigms rely on purely CNN-based architectures which often fail in incorporating relations of long-range lane points and global contexts induced by surrounding objects (e.g., pedestrians, vehicles). Inspired by recent advances of the transformer encoder-decoder architecture in various vision tasks, we move forwards to design a new end-to-end Laneformer architecture that revolutionizes the conventional transformers into better capturing the shape and semantic characteristics of lanes, with minimal overhead in latency. First, coupling with deformable pixel-wise self-attention in the encoder, Laneformer presents two new row and column self-attention operations to efficiently mine point context along with the lane shapes. Second, motivated by the appearing objects would affect the decision of predicting lane segments, Laneformer further includes the detected object instances as extra inputs of multi-head attention blocks in the encoder and decoder to facilitate the lane point detection by sensing semantic contexts. Specifically, the bounding box locations of objects are added into Key module to provide interaction with each pixel and query while the ROI-aligned features are inserted into Value module. Extensive experiments demonstrate our Laneformer achieves state-of-the-art performances on CULane benchmark, in terms of 77.1% F1 score. We hope our simple and effective Laneformer will serve as a strong baseline for future research in self-attention models for lane detection.

Yuxuan Hu, Minghuan Tan, Chenwei Zhang et al.

Empathetic response generation is designed to comprehend the emotions of others and select the most appropriate strategies to assist them in resolving emotional challenges. Empathy can be categorized into cognitive empathy and affective empathy. The former pertains to the ability to understand and discern the emotional issues and situations of others, while the latter involves the capacity to provide comfort. To enhance one's empathetic abilities, it is essential to develop both these aspects. Therefore, we develop an innovative framework that combines retrieval augmentation and emotional support strategy integration. Our framework starts with the introduction of a comprehensive emotional palette for empathy. We then apply appraisal theory to decompose this palette and create a database of empathetic responses. This database serves as an external resource and enhances the LLM's empathy by integrating semantic retrieval mechanisms. Moreover, our framework places a strong emphasis on the proper articulation of response strategies. By incorporating emotional support strategies, we aim to enrich the model's capabilities in both cognitive and affective empathy, leading to a more nuanced and comprehensive empathetic response. Finally, we extract datasets ED and ET from the empathetic dialogue dataset \textsc{EmpatheticDialogues} and ExTES based on dialogue length. Experiments demonstrate that our framework can enhance the empathy ability of LLMs from both cognitive and affective empathy perspectives. Our code is released at https://github.com/CAS-SIAT-XinHai/APTNESS.

Mengxue Qu, Yu Wu, Wu Liu et al.

In this paper, we investigate how to achieve better visual grounding with modern vision-language transformers, and propose a simple yet powerful Selective Retraining (SiRi) mechanism for this challenging task. Particularly, SiRi conveys a significant principle to the research of visual grounding, i.e., a better initialized vision-language encoder would help the model converge to a better local minimum, advancing the performance accordingly. In specific, we continually update the parameters of the encoder as the training goes on, while periodically re-initialize rest of the parameters to compel the model to be better optimized based on an enhanced encoder. SiRi can significantly outperform previous approaches on three popular benchmarks. Specifically, our method achieves 83.04% Top1 accuracy on RefCOCO+ testA, outperforming the state-of-the-art approaches (training from scratch) by more than 10.21%. Additionally, we reveal that SiRi performs surprisingly superior even with limited training data. We also extend it to transformer-based visual grounding models and other vision-language tasks to verify the validity.

Binbin Yang, Yi Luo, Ziliang Chen et al.

Thanks to the rapid development of diffusion models, unprecedented progress has been witnessed in image synthesis. Prior works mostly rely on pre-trained linguistic models, but a text is often too abstract to properly specify all the spatial properties of an image, e.g., the layout configuration of a scene, leading to the sub-optimal results of complex scene generation. In this paper, we achieve accurate complex scene generation by proposing a semantically controllable Layout-AWare diffusion model, termed LAW-Diffusion. Distinct from the previous Layout-to-Image generation (L2I) methods that only explore category-aware relationships, LAW-Diffusion introduces a spatial dependency parser to encode the location-aware semantic coherence across objects as a layout embedding and produces a scene with perceptually harmonious object styles and contextual relations. To be specific, we delicately instantiate each object's regional semantics as an object region map and leverage a location-aware cross-object attention module to capture the spatial dependencies among those disentangled representations. We further propose an adaptive guidance schedule for our layout guidance to mitigate the trade-off between the regional semantic alignment and the texture fidelity of generated objects. Moreover, LAW-Diffusion allows for instance reconfiguration while maintaining the other regions in a synthesized image by introducing a layout-aware latent grafting mechanism to recompose its local regional semantics. To better verify the plausibility of generated scenes, we propose a new evaluation metric for the L2I task, dubbed Scene Relation Score (SRS) to measure how the images preserve the rational and harmonious relations among contextual objects. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our LAW-Diffusion yields the state-of-the-art generative performance, especially with coherent object relations.

Xunlin Zhan, Yuan Li, Xiao Dong et al.

Commonsense question answering requires reasoning about everyday situations and causes and effects implicit in context. Typically, existing approaches first retrieve external evidence and then perform commonsense reasoning using these evidence. In this paper, we propose a Self-supervised Bidirectional Encoder Representation Learning of Commonsense (elBERto) framework, which is compatible with off-the-shelf QA model architectures. The framework comprises five self-supervised tasks to force the model to fully exploit the additional training signals from contexts containing rich commonsense. The tasks include a novel Contrastive Relation Learning task to encourage the model to distinguish between logically contrastive contexts, a new Jigsaw Puzzle task that requires the model to infer logical chains in long contexts, and three classic SSL tasks to maintain pre-trained models language encoding ability. On the representative WIQA, CosmosQA, and ReClor datasets, elBERto outperforms all other methods, including those utilizing explicit graph reasoning and external knowledge retrieval. Moreover, elBERto achieves substantial improvements on out-of-paragraph and no-effect questions where simple lexical similarity comparison does not help, indicating that it successfully learns commonsense and is able to leverage it when given dynamic context.

Siyi Hu, Chuanlong Xie, Xiaodan Liang et al.

Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is making rapid progress for solving tasks in a grid world and real-world scenarios, in which agents are given different attributes and goals, resulting in different behavior through the whole multi-agent task. In this study, we quantify the agent's behavior difference and build its relationship with the policy performance via {\bf Role Diversity}, a metric to measure the characteristics of MARL tasks. We define role diversity from three perspectives: action-based, trajectory-based, and contribution-based to fully measure a multi-agent task. Through theoretical analysis, we find that the error bound in MARL can be decomposed into three parts that have a strong relation to the role diversity. The decomposed factors can significantly impact policy optimization on three popular directions including parameter sharing, communication mechanism, and credit assignment. The main experimental platforms are based on {\bf Multiagent Particle Environment (MPE)} and {\bf The StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC). Extensive experiments} clearly show that role diversity can serve as a robust measurement for the characteristics of a multi-agent cooperation task and help diagnose whether the policy fits the current multi-agent system for a better policy performance.

Xiwen Liang, Yangxin Wu, Jianhua Han et al.

Aiming towards a holistic understanding of multiple downstream tasks simultaneously, there is a need for extracting features with better transferability. Though many latest self-supervised pre-training methods have achieved impressive performance on various vision tasks under the prevailing pretrain-finetune paradigm, their generalization capacity to multi-task learning scenarios is yet to be explored. In this paper, we extensively investigate the transfer performance of various types of self-supervised methods, e.g., MoCo and SimCLR, on three downstream tasks, including semantic segmentation, drivable area segmentation, and traffic object detection, on the large-scale driving dataset BDD100K. We surprisingly find that their performances are sub-optimal or even lag far behind the single-task baseline, which may be due to the distinctions of training objectives and architectural design lied in the pretrain-finetune paradigm. To overcome this dilemma as well as avoid redesigning the resource-intensive pre-training stage, we propose a simple yet effective pretrain-adapt-finetune paradigm for general multi-task training, where the off-the-shelf pretrained models can be effectively adapted without increasing the training overhead. During the adapt stage, we utilize learnable multi-scale adapters to dynamically adjust the pretrained model weights supervised by multi-task objectives while leaving the pretrained knowledge untouched. Furthermore, we regard the vision-language pre-training model CLIP as a strong complement to the pretrain-adapt-finetune paradigm and propose a novel adapter named LV-Adapter, which incorporates language priors in the multi-task model via task-specific prompting and alignment between visual and textual features.

Runhui Huang, Yanxin Long, Jianhua Han et al.

Large-scale cross-modal pre-training paradigms have recently shown ubiquitous success on a wide range of downstream tasks, e.g., zero-shot classification, retrieval and image captioning. However, their successes highly rely on the scale and quality of web-crawled data that naturally contain incomplete and noisy information (e.g., wrong or irrelevant content). Existing works either design manual rules to clean data or generate pseudo-targets as auxiliary signals for reducing noise impact, which do not explicitly tackle both the incorrect and incomplete challenges simultaneously. In this paper, to automatically mitigate the impact of noise by solely mining over existing data, we propose a principled Noise-robust Language-Image Pre-training framework (NLIP) to stabilize pre-training via two schemes: noise-harmonization and noise-completion. First, in noise-harmonization scheme, NLIP estimates the noise probability of each pair according to the memorization effect of cross-modal transformers, then adopts noise-adaptive regularization to harmonize the cross-modal alignments with varying degrees. Second, in noise-completion scheme, to enrich the missing object information of text, NLIP injects a concept-conditioned cross-modal decoder to obtain semantic-consistent synthetic captions to complete noisy ones, which uses the retrieved visual concepts (i.e., objects' names) for the corresponding image to guide captioning generation. By collaboratively optimizing noise-harmonization and noise-completion schemes, our NLIP can alleviate the common noise effects during image-text pre-training in a more efficient way. Extensive experiments show the significant performance improvements of our NLIP using only 26M data over existing pre-trained models (e.g., CLIP, FILIP and BLIP) on 12 zero-shot classification datasets, MSCOCO image captioning and zero-shot image-text retrieval tasks.

Zutao Jiang, Guansong Lu, Xiaodan Liang et al.

Text-guided 3D object generation aims to generate 3D objects described by user-defined captions, which paves a flexible way to visualize what we imagined. Although some works have been devoted to solving this challenging task, these works either utilize some explicit 3D representations (e.g., mesh), which lack texture and require post-processing for rendering photo-realistic views; or require individual time-consuming optimization for every single case. Here, we make the first attempt to achieve generic text-guided cross-category 3D object generation via a new 3D-TOGO model, which integrates a text-to-views generation module and a views-to-3D generation module. The text-to-views generation module is designed to generate different views of the target 3D object given an input caption. prior-guidance, caption-guidance and view contrastive learning are proposed for achieving better view-consistency and caption similarity. Meanwhile, a pixelNeRF model is adopted for the views-to-3D generation module to obtain the implicit 3D neural representation from the previously-generated views. Our 3D-TOGO model generates 3D objects in the form of the neural radiance field with good texture and requires no time-cost optimization for every single caption. Besides, 3D-TOGO can control the category, color and shape of generated 3D objects with the input caption. Extensive experiments on the largest 3D object dataset (i.e., ABO) are conducted to verify that 3D-TOGO can better generate high-quality 3D objects according to the input captions across 98 different categories, in terms of PSNR, SSIM, LPIPS and CLIP-score, compared with text-NeRF and Dreamfields.

Zhenyu Xie, Zaiyu Huang, Xin Dong et al.

Image-based Virtual Try-ON aims to transfer an in-shop garment onto a specific person. Existing methods employ a global warping module to model the anisotropic deformation for different garment parts, which fails to preserve the semantic information of different parts when receiving challenging inputs (e.g, intricate human poses, difficult garments). Moreover, most of them directly warp the input garment to align with the boundary of the preserved region, which usually requires texture squeezing to meet the boundary shape constraint and thus leads to texture distortion. The above inferior performance hinders existing methods from real-world applications. To address these problems and take a step towards real-world virtual try-on, we propose a General-Purpose Virtual Try-ON framework, named GP-VTON, by developing an innovative Local-Flow Global-Parsing (LFGP) warping module and a Dynamic Gradient Truncation (DGT) training strategy. Specifically, compared with the previous global warping mechanism, LFGP employs local flows to warp garments parts individually, and assembles the local warped results via the global garment parsing, resulting in reasonable warped parts and a semantic-correct intact garment even with challenging inputs.On the other hand, our DGT training strategy dynamically truncates the gradient in the overlap area and the warped garment is no more required to meet the boundary constraint, which effectively avoids the texture squeezing problem. Furthermore, our GP-VTON can be easily extended to multi-category scenario and jointly trained by using data from different garment categories. Extensive experiments on two high-resolution benchmarks demonstrate our superiority over the existing state-of-the-art methods.

Minbin Huang, Zhijian Huang, Changlin Li et al.

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) aims to find efficient models for multiple tasks. Beyond seeking solutions for a single task, there are surging interests in transferring network design knowledge across multiple tasks. In this line of research, effectively modeling task correlations is vital yet highly neglected. Therefore, we propose \textbf{Arch-Graph}, a transferable NAS method that predicts task-specific optimal architectures with respect to given task embeddings. It leverages correlations across multiple tasks by using their embeddings as a part of the predictor's input for fast adaptation. We also formulate NAS as an architecture relation graph prediction problem, with the relational graph constructed by treating candidate architectures as nodes and their pairwise relations as edges. To enforce some basic properties such as acyclicity in the relational graph, we add additional constraints to the optimization process, converting NAS into the problem of finding a Maximal Weighted Acyclic Subgraph (MWAS). Our algorithm then strives to eliminate cycles and only establish edges in the graph if the rank results can be trusted. Through MWAS, Arch-Graph can effectively rank candidate models for each task with only a small budget to finetune the predictor. With extensive experiments on TransNAS-Bench-101, we show Arch-Graph's transferability and high sample efficiency across numerous tasks, beating many NAS methods designed for both single-task and multi-task search. It is able to find top 0.16\% and 0.29\% architectures on average on two search spaces under the budget of only 50 models.

Kaixin Cai, Pengzhen Ren, Jianhua Han et al.

Open-world semantic segmentation presently relies significantly on extensive image-text pair datasets, which often suffer from a lack of fine-grained pixel annotations on sufficient categories. The acquisition of such data is rendered economically prohibitive due to the substantial investments of both human labor and time. In light of the formidable image generation capabilities of diffusion models, we introduce a novel diffusion model-driven pipeline for automatically generating datasets tailored to the needs of open-world semantic segmentation, named "MagicSeg". Our MagicSeg initiates from class labels and proceeds to generate high-fidelity textual descriptions, which in turn serve as guidance for the diffusion model to generate images. Rather than only generating positive samples for each label, our process encompasses the simultaneous generation of corresponding negative images, designed to serve as paired counterfactual samples for contrastive training. Then, to provide a self-supervised signal for open-world segmentation pretraining, our MagicSeg integrates an open-vocabulary detection model and an interactive segmentation model to extract object masks as precise segmentation labels from images based on the provided category labels. By applying our dataset to the contrastive language-image pretraining model with the pseudo mask supervision and the auxiliary counterfactual contrastive training, the downstream model obtains strong performance on open-world semantic segmentation. We evaluate our model on PASCAL VOC, PASCAL Context, and COCO, achieving SOTA with performance of 62.9%, 26.7%, and 40.2%, respectively, demonstrating our dataset's effectiveness in enhancing open-world semantic segmentation capabilities. Project website: https://github.com/ckxhp/magicseg.

Bingqian Lin, Zicong Chen, Mingjie Li et al.

Medical artificial general intelligence (MAGI) enables one foundation model to solve different medical tasks, which is very practical in the medical domain. It can significantly reduce the requirement of large amounts of task-specific data by sufficiently sharing medical knowledge among different tasks. However, due to the challenges of designing strongly generalizable models with limited and complex medical data, most existing approaches tend to develop task-specific models. To take a step towards MAGI, we propose a new paradigm called Medical-knOwledge-enhanced mulTimOdal pretRaining (MOTOR). In MOTOR, we combine two kinds of basic medical knowledge, i.e., general and specific knowledge, in a complementary manner to boost the general pretraining process. As a result, the foundation model with comprehensive basic knowledge can learn compact representations from pretraining radiographic data for better cross-modal alignment. MOTOR unifies the understanding and generation, which are two kinds of core intelligence of an AI system, into a single medical foundation model, to flexibly handle more diverse medical tasks. To enable a comprehensive evaluation and facilitate further research, we construct a medical multimodal benchmark including a wide range of downstream tasks, such as chest x-ray report generation and medical visual question answering. Extensive experiments on our benchmark show that MOTOR obtains promising results through simple task-oriented adaptation. The visualization shows that the injected knowledge successfully highlights key information in the medical data, demonstrating the excellent interpretability of MOTOR. Our MOTOR successfully mimics the human practice of fulfilling a "medical student" to accelerate the process of becoming a "specialist". We believe that our work makes a significant stride in realizing MAGI.

Xin Dong, Fuwei Zhao, Zhenyu Xie et al.

While significant progress has been made in garment transfer, one of the most applicable directions of human-centric image generation, existing works overlook the in-the-wild imagery, presenting severe garment-person misalignment as well as noticeable degradation in fine texture details. This paper, therefore, attends to virtual try-on in real-world scenes and brings essential improvements in authenticity and naturalness especially for loose garment (e.g., skirts, formal dresses), challenging poses (e.g., cross arms, bent legs), and cluttered backgrounds. Specifically, we find that the pixel flow excels at handling loose garments whereas the vertex flow is preferred for hard poses, and by combining their advantages we propose a novel generative network called wFlow that can effectively push up garment transfer to in-the-wild context. Moreover, former approaches require paired images for training. Instead, we cut down the laboriousness by working on a newly constructed large-scale video dataset named Dance50k with self-supervised cross-frame training and an online cycle optimization. The proposed Dance50k can boost real-world virtual dressing by covering a wide variety of garments under dancing poses. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our wFlow in generating realistic garment transfer results for in-the-wild images without resorting to expensive paired datasets.

Yinya Huang, Hongming Zhang, Ruixin Hong et al.

In this paper, we propose a comprehensive benchmark to investigate models' logical reasoning capabilities in complex real-life scenarios. Current explanation datasets often employ synthetic data with simple reasoning structures. Therefore, it cannot express more complex reasoning processes, such as the rebuttal to a reasoning step and the degree of certainty of the evidence. To this end, we propose a comprehensive logical reasoning explanation form. Based on the multi-hop chain of reasoning, the explanation form includes three main components: (1) The condition of rebuttal that the reasoning node can be challenged; (2) Logical formulae that uncover the internal texture of reasoning nodes; (3) Reasoning strength indicated by degrees of certainty. The fine-grained structure conforms to the real logical reasoning scenario, better fitting the human cognitive process but, simultaneously, is more challenging for the current models. We evaluate the current best models' performance on this new explanation form. The experimental results show that generating reasoning graphs remains a challenging task for current models, even with the help of giant pre-trained language models.

Yunshuang Nie, Bingqian Lin, Minzhe Niu et al.

Pre-trained Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) provide a knowledge-rich foundation for post-training by leveraging their inherent perception and reasoning capabilities to solve complex tasks. However, the lack of an efficient evaluation framework impedes the diagnosis of their performance bottlenecks. Current evaluation primarily relies on testing after supervised fine-tuning, which introduces laborious additional training and autoregressive decoding costs. Meanwhile, common pre-training metrics cannot quantify a model's perception and reasoning abilities in a disentangled manner. Furthermore, existing evaluation benchmarks are typically limited in scale or misaligned with pre-training objectives. Thus, we propose RADAR, an efficient ability-centric evaluation framework for Revealing Asymmetric Development of Abilities in MLLM pRe-training. RADAR involves two key components: (1) Soft Discrimination Score, a novel metric for robustly tracking ability development without fine-tuning, based on quantifying nuanced gradations of the model preference for the correct answer over distractors; and (2) Multi-Modal Mixture Benchmark, a new 15K+ sample benchmark for comprehensively evaluating pre-trained MLLMs' perception and reasoning abilities in a 0-shot manner, where we unify authoritative benchmark datasets and carefully collect new datasets, extending the evaluation scope and addressing the critical gaps in current benchmarks. With RADAR, we comprehensively reveal the asymmetric development of perceptual and reasoning capabilities in pretrained MLLMs across diverse factors, including data volume, model size, and pretraining strategy. Our RADAR underscores the need for a decomposed perspective on pre-training ability bottlenecks, informing targeted interventions to advance MLLMs efficiently. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Nieysh/RADAR.

Yihan Zeng, Chenhan Jiang, Jiageng Mao et al.

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training, benefiting from large-scale unlabeled text-image pairs, has demonstrated great performance in open-world vision understanding tasks. However, due to the limited Text-3D data pairs, adapting the success of 2D Vision-Language Models (VLM) to the 3D space remains an open problem. Existing works that leverage VLM for 3D understanding generally resort to constructing intermediate 2D representations for the 3D data, but at the cost of losing 3D geometry information. To take a step toward open-world 3D vision understanding, we propose Contrastive Language-Image-Point Cloud Pretraining (CLIP$^2$) to directly learn the transferable 3D point cloud representation in realistic scenarios with a novel proxy alignment mechanism. Specifically, we exploit naturally-existed correspondences in 2D and 3D scenarios, and build well-aligned and instance-based text-image-point proxies from those complex scenarios. On top of that, we propose a cross-modal contrastive objective to learn semantic and instance-level aligned point cloud representation. Experimental results on both indoor and outdoor scenarios show that our learned 3D representation has great transfer ability in downstream tasks, including zero-shot and few-shot 3D recognition, which boosts the state-of-the-art methods by large margins. Furthermore, we provide analyses of the capability of different representations in real scenarios and present the optional ensemble scheme.

Haoyuan Li, Qihang Cao, Tao Tang et al.

Recent progress in spatial reasoning with Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) increasingly leverages geometric priors from 3D encoders. However, most existing integration strategies remain passive: geometry is exposed as a global stream and fused in an indiscriminate manner, which often induces semantic-geometry misalignment and redundant signals. We propose GeoThinker, a framework that shifts the paradigm from passive fusion to active perception. Instead of feature mixing, GeoThinker enables the model to selectively retrieve geometric evidence conditioned on its internal reasoning demands. GeoThinker achieves this through Spatial-Grounded Fusion applied at carefully selected VLM layers, where semantic visual priors selectively query and integrate task-relevant geometry via frame-strict cross-attention, further calibrated by Importance Gating that biases per-frame attention toward task-relevant structures. Comprehensive evaluation results show that GeoThinker sets a new state-of-the-art in spatial intelligence, achieving a peak score of 72.6 on the VSI-Bench. Furthermore, GeoThinker demonstrates robust generalization and significantly improved spatial perception across complex downstream scenarios, including embodied referring and autonomous driving. Our results indicate that the ability to actively integrate spatial structures is essential for next-generation spatial intelligence. Code can be found at https://github.com/Li-Hao-yuan/GeoThinker.